BASIC and ASP.NET

History of Basic

The programming language Basic is almost as old as the PC itself. The first PCs shipped with DOS and Basic as their only software. You had to learn to program if you wanted to do anything with your computer. The original basic was unstructured. A program consisted of a maximum of 65000 numbered lines. To reuse code you had to create a "GOTO" statement that sent the execution back to a particular line, and then another GOTO to move the execution forward again. This made for very unreadable code. Quick Basic was an improvement on this first Basic. It allowed you to break code into subroutines, lose the line numbering, and broke the 65000 line limit.

When Windows 3.1 was shipped, Basic became Visual Basic. It included a designer that provided the programmer with the an empty Windows form on which he or she could drag various controls. It was event driven, meanining it responded to the users actions, such as clicking on a button, or double clicking a text.

Visual Basic 4 was important because it introduced ADO. ADO was a "Wrapper" around "OLEDB" -- as set of libraries for talking to various databases. A wrapper is a set of programs that provide a simplified interface to a complex set of actions. OLEDB was difficult and required high level programming expertise. ADO made it easy to include data access in a program, and Visual Basic became the language of Choice for data driven programs.

Visual Basic.Net made huge changes in VB. For the first time, Visual Basic was a fully object oriented language with classes, inheritance and polymorphism. For the first time it had all the power of C# and most of the power of C++.

ASP, ASP.Net
Because of ADO VB became a popular language for scripting web pages. ASP stands for Active Server Pages. Instead of using Java Script or PHP, you could write your code in VB Script. This gave you the power of VB, but had some serious drawbacks. For one, it would only run on computers running Windows and Internet Explorer.

ASP.Net changed that. Now you could use VB and have your web page run on any operating system and in any browser. Additionally, it was no longer script, but fully compiled programming code with full object oriented capabilities.

Elements of ASP.Net
ASP.Net is difficult because it brings together a number of different skills. You need to be able to program in VB or C#. You need a good knowledge of xhtml and CSS. You also should have some expertise with xml.

We will look at all these elements in this class