In the previous tutorial we covered the installation of a basic C# web development environment. The next step is to leverage this environment to program our first simple web application. We'll be using Visual Web Developer to build the C# web application within IIS (also installed in the last tutorial).

This tutorial should serve as an introduction to object oriented programming using C# in an ASP.NET context. I'll be assuming no prior knowledge of programming languages. Any prior knowledge of any C++ based languages will probably help (as long as you remember to unlearn the stuff that doesn't fit).

For the uninitiated, C# is a programming language developed by Microsoft. Like most modern langauges, it's based off of C++ and tries to address alot of the shortcomings of the C++ language. This includes things like security and memory management. Depending on who you ask you'll get different opinions as to how successful they were. These subjects aren't going to mean much to someone with no experience in the language. Rather than bore or intimidate you with topics you're not going to fully understand yet, let's put all that aside and just get into our first web application.

However, one last point before we begin. Let me emphasize that I am not your typical Visual Studio programmer. Microsoft has prebuilt alot of functionality into Visual Studio with the web developer in mind. Most of this is to make the developer's job easier. There's a built-in framework for AJAX, postback for forms and all kinds of other gizmos. Having come from PHP, I prefer to code this all myself. You can use Visual Studio's interface to do this for you but these tutorials will show building everything from scratch. I find the code is faster, more cross-browser compatible and cleaner when I build it manually. This may not be the "right" way as defined by some people. However, in my opinion, as long as the code works and doesn't have some serious flaw, who cares?