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Creating .NET Applications Using C#

C# can also be used to create console applications: text-only applications that run in a DOS window. You’ll probably use console applications when unit testing class libraries, and for creating Unix or Linux daemon processes. However, more often you’ll use C# to create applications that use many of the technologies associated with .NET. This section gives you an overview of the different types of applications that you can write in C#.

Creating ASP.NET Applications

Active Server Pages (ASP) is a Microsoft technology for creating Web pages with dynamic content. An ASP page is basically an HTML file with embedded chunks of server-side VBScript or JavaScript. When a client browser requests an ASP page, the Web server delivers the HTML portions of the page, processing the server-side scripts as it comes to them. Often these scripts query a database for data, and mark up that data in HTML. ASP is an easy way for clients to build browser-based applications.

However, ASP is not without its shortcomings. First, ASP pages sometimes render slowly because the server-side code is interpreted instead of compiled. Second, ASP files can be difficult to maintain because they were unstructured; the server-side ASP code and plain HTML are all jumbled up together. Third, ASP sometimes makes development difficult because there is little support for error handling and type-checking. Specifically, if you are using VBScript and want to implement error handling in your pages, you have to use the On Error Resume Next statement, and follow every component call with a check to Err.Number to make sure that the call had gone well.

ASP.NET is a complete revision of ASP that fixes many of its problems. It does not replace ASP; rather, ASP.NET pages can live side by side on the same server with legacy ASP applications. Of course, you can also program ASP.NET with C#!

The following section explores the key features of ASP.NET. For more details, refer to Chapters 32, “ASP.NET Pages” and 33, “ASP.NET Development.”

Features of ASP.NET

First, and perhaps most important, ASP.NET pages are structured. That is, each page is effectively a class that inherits from the .NET System.Web.UI.Page class and can override a set of methods that are evoked during the Page object’s lifetime. (You can think of these events as page-specific cousins of the OnApplication_Start and OnSession_Start events that went in the global.asa files of plain old ASP.) Because you can factor a page’s functionality into event handlers with explicit meanings, ASP.NET pages are easier to understand.

Another nice thing about ASP.NET pages is that you can create them in Visual Studio 2009, the same environment in which you create the business logic and data access components that those ASP.NET pages use. A Visual Studio 2009 project, or solution, contains all of the files associated with an application. Moreover, you can debug your classic ASP pages in the editor as well; in the old days of Visual InterDev, it was often a vexing challenge to configure InterDev and the project’s Web server to turn debugging on.

For maximum clarity, the ASP.NET code-behind feature lets you take the structured approach even further. ASP.NET allows you to isolate the server-side functionality of a page to a class, compile that class into a DLL, and place that DLL into a directory below the HTML portion. A code-behind directive at the top of the page associates the file with its DLL. When a browser requests the page, the Web server fires the events in the class in the page’s code-behind DLL.

Last, but not least, ASP.NET is remarkable for its increased performance. Whereas classic ASP pages are interpreted with each page request, the Web server caches ASP.NET pages after compilation. This means that subsequent requests of an ASP.NET page execute more quickly than the first.

ASP.NET also makes it easy to write pages that cause forms to be displayed by the browser, which you might use in an intranet environment. The traditional wisdom is that form-based applications offer a richer user interface but are harder to maintain because they run on so many different machines. For this reason, people have relied on form-based applications when rich user interfaces were a necessity and extensive support could be provided to the users.

Web Forms

To make Web page construction even easier, Visual Studio 2009 supplies Web Forms. They allow you to build ASP.NET pages graphically in the same way that Visual Basic 6 or C++ Builder windows are created; in other words, by dragging controls from a toolbox onto a form, then flipping over to the code aspect of that form and writing event handlers for the controls. When you use C# to create a Web Form, you are creating a C# class that inherits from the Page base class and an ASP.NET page that designates that class as its code-behind. Of course, you don’t have to use C# to create a Web Form; you can use Visual Basic 2009 or another .NET-compliant language just as well.

In the past, the difficulty of Web development discouraged some teams from attempting it. To succeed in Web development, you had to know so many different technologies, such as VBScript, ASP, DHTML, JavaScript, and so on. By applying the Form concepts to Web pages, Web Forms have made Web development considerably easier.

Web Server Controls

The controls used to populate a Web Form are not controls in the same sense as ActiveX controls. Rather, they are XML tags in the ASP.NET namespace that the Web browser dynamically transforms into HTML and client-side script when a page is requested. Amazingly, the Web server is able to render the same server-side control in different ways, producing a transformation appropriate to the requestor’s particular Web browser. This means that it is now easy to write fairly sophisticated user interfaces for Web pages, without having to worry about how to ensure that your page will run on any of the available browsers - because Web Forms will take care of that for you.

You can use C# or Visual Basic 2009 to expand the Web Form toolbox. Creating a new server-side control is simply a matter of implementing .NET’s System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl class.

XML Web Services

Today, HTML pages account for most of the traffic on the World Wide Web. With XML, however, computers have a device-independent format to use for communicating with each other on the Web. In the future, computers may use the Web and XML to communicate information rather than dedicated lines and proprietary formats such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). XML Web services are designed for a service-oriented Web, in which remote computers provide each other with dynamic information that can be analyzed and reformatted, before final presentation to a user. An XML Web service is an easy way for a computer to expose information to other computers on the Web in the form of XML.

In technical terms, an XML Web service on .NET is an ASP.NET page that returns XML instead of HTML to requesting clients. Such pages have a code-behind DLL containing a class that derives from the WebService class. The Visual Studio 2009 IDE provides an engine that facilitates Web service development.

An organization might choose to use XML Web services for two main reasons. The first reason is that they rely on HTTP; XML Web services can use existing networks (HTTP) as a medium for conveying information. The other is that because XML Web services use XML, the data format is self-describing, nonproprietary, and platform-independent.

Creating Windows Forms

Although C# and .NET are particularly suited to Web development, they still offer splendid support for so-called fat-client or thick-client apps, applications that have to be installed on the end user’s machine where most of the processing takes place. This support is from Windows Forms.

A Windows Form is the .NET answer to a Visual Basic 6 Form. To design a graphical window interface, you just drag controls from a toolbox onto a Windows Form. To determine the window’s behavior, you write event-handling routines for the form’s controls. A Windows Form project compiles to an executable that must be installed alongside the .NET runtime on the end user’s computer. Like other .NET project types, Windows Form projects are supported by both Visual Basic 2009 and C#. Chapter 28, “Windows Forms,” examines Windows Forms more closely.

Using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

One of the newest technologies to hit the block is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). WPF makes use of XAML in building applications. XAML stands for Extensible Application Markup Language. This new way of creating applications within a Microsoft environment is something that was introduced in 2006 and is part of the .NET Framework 3.0. This means that in order to run any WPF application, you are going to need to make sure that the .NET Framework 3.0 is installed on the client machine. WPF applications will be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 (the only operating systems which allow for the installation of the .NET Framework 3.0).

XAML is the XML declaration that is used to create a form which represents all the visual aspect and behaviors of the WPF application. While it is possible to work with a WPF application programmatically, WPF is a step in the direction of declarative programming, which the industry is moving to. Declarative programming means that instead of creating objects through programming in a compiled language such as C#, VB, or Java; instead, you declare everything through XML-type programming. Chapter 31, “Windows Presentation Foundation” goes into detail on how to build these new types of applications using XAML and C#.

Windows Controls

Although Web Forms and Windows Forms are developed in much the same way, you use different kinds of controls to populate them. Web Forms use Web server controls, and Windows Forms use Windows Controls.

A Windows Control is a lot like an ActiveX control. After a Windows Control is implemented, it compiles to a DLL that must be installed on the client’s machine. In fact, the .NET SDK provides a utility that creates a wrapper for ActiveX controls, so that they can be placed on Windows Forms. As is the case with Web Controls, Windows Control creation involves deriving from a particular class, System.Windows.Forms.Control.

Windows Services

A Windows Service (originally called an NT Service) is a program designed to run in the background in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 (but not Windows 9x). Services are useful where you want a program to be running continuously and ready to respond to events without having been explicitly started by the user. A good example is the World Wide Web Service on Web servers, which listens for Web requests from clients.

It is very easy to write services in C#. .NET Framework base classes are available in the System .ServiceProcess namespace that handle many of the boilerplate tasks associated with services, and in addition, Visual Studio .NET allows you to create a C# Windows Service project, which uses C# source code for a basic Windows service. Chapter 22, “Windows Services,” explores how to write C# Windows Services.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Looking at how you move data and services from one point to another using Microsoft-based technologies, you will find that there are a lot of choices at your disposal. For instance, you can use ASP.NET Web services, .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, and MSMQ for starters. What technology should you use? Well, it really comes down to what you are trying to achieve, as each technology is better used in a particular situation.

With that in mind, Microsoft really brought all these technologies together, and with the release of the .NET Framework 3.0, you now have a single way to move data - the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF provides you with the ability to build your service one time and then expose this service in a multitude of ways (under different protocols even) by just making changes within a configuration file. You will find WCF a powerful new way of connecting disparate systems. Chapter 40, “Windows Communication Foundation,” covers this all in detail.


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