I had the opportunity to work on classic ASP before and let me tell you, it’s really hard to create a dynamic website especially for data entry-type of web applications.  You need to do a lot of client-side scripting and some tricks on the server side to make your web applications behave like desktop applications.

I remember creating a simple online store management application for a music retailer company years ago using just Notepad mostly, and FrontPage.  Does not have any graphics though since this is a back-office-kind of application and the client only wants a basic data entry interface and reporting.  Database is in Access and the web server is IIS using classic ASP on Windows NT.  I made use of Windows scripting to create my components so I can host them on an MTS environment.  I had lots of Javascript code on the client browser just to make it behave like a desktop application.  It’s way too much work really.

Recently I have been reading up on ASP.NET 2.0, actually viewing the video tutorials that the Microsoft ASP.NET website has put up for the beginners.  It’s really easy now to create a web application and looking back at the online store management application I created, I could have done that in a week’s time or even less.  You can find the tutorials here.

Hopefully this blog will help me acquire the knowledge I need to fully use ASP.NET 2.0 in building the latest generation of web applications and at the same time share my newly found knowledge to you beginners out there.  So let’s get ramped up!