ASP.NET is a rich programming framework for building web-based applications. It offers outstanding support for both developers and administrators, providing improved ease-of-use, tool support, reliability, scalability, administration and security.

To start with you should be familiar with basic Web programming fundamentals such as HTML tags, web site organization and CSS. You do not need previous ASP experience, but you should be familiar with the concepts behind interactive Web pages, including forms, scripts, and data access.

New in ASP.Net 2.0

The first version of ASP.NET offered several important advantages over previous Web development models. Now ASP.Net 2.0 has introduced exciting features in the areas of web developer's productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance. Its programming framework is built on CLR(Common language runtime) that can be used to build powerful web applications.

Along with old asp.net server controls, ASP.NET 2.0 introduces many new server controls. Some of the new families of controls :

• Data Controls
• Navigation Controls
• Login Controls
• Web Part Controls
• Master Pages
• Themes and Skins
• Personalization
• Localization

About Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is part of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 family, and is the powerful development tool for developing data driven web applications with ASP.NET 2.0
It provides :

• Better Source Code Editing + intellisense everywhere
• Rich Visual Designer
• Template editing
• FTP support
• XHTML complaint designer

Further we will discuss practical examples and features in ASP.NET