Is it possible to use Vb.net to make things for the web like forms and applications?

Basically, what is it capable of online?

I'm a second year programming student and all we do is make small programs and I was wondering what some of the other capabilties are.

ASP.NET is programmed using either VB.NET or C# , so yes it is possible to port vb.net programs to the net, or program web applications with vb.net

I suggest you pick up an ASP.NET programming book, preferably one by Jesse Liberty (Oreilly's Programing ASp.NET )

you basically have to develop a web application, if you are using .net you can use any of the .net languages (C#, J#, VB.net, managed C++.net)

There are a number of classes that allow you to build web applications in the System.web namespace.

System.Web.UI.ServerControls and System.Web.UI.HtmlControls have all the classes to build web forms (basically dynamic page with the extension aspx and a code behind file written in any .net language).

System.Data contains all the ADO.net classes used to connect to a datasource (such as a database or XML).

I would strongly recommend to get Visual Studio is you are going to get into this.

you can check gotdotnet.com as a source for training material.

www.asp.net is a good resource to start

You can do this on Linux/*NIX using the mono project, http://mono-project.com

can compile C# and VB to .NET compliant apps that can be ran on Linux/*NIX, they have an asp server and mod_mono for running ASP[.NET] in apache.

worth a checkout. it even runs on windows and is free. novell pumps a lot of money into the project.

I find that MONO is a good start for developing in Linux/MAC yadda yadda, but personally the ASP.NET side of it to me is useless as the ADO.NET is still very very buggy. What is the use of programming a website that does not even store anything in a database? I mean, there are uses, but none that I know of off hand (validation?? and webservices I guess.... but still )

C# ( i guess vb.net too ) is a VERY VERY nice language i find for developing in both asp.net and windows.

There are many tutorials online for free as mentioned before,

asp.net is a good site

I use
msdn.microsoft.com for my help.

Good luck!

Dotnet is actually a great environment for the web, provided you use it with C# :-). Dotnet is meant to run like a Windows Application ( pre-compiled ) but via the web. Once your web application is compiled it doesn't have to parse like a scripting language ( php, vbscript ) does. This means that it "can" be much faster and more efficient. If you can get your hands on Visual Studio and get to know that, it also makes developing time much shorter. Dotnet gives you access to functions that will write much of the css and javascript you would have to manually write in other web languages.

If you are looking for a free dotnet programming ide, head over to www . asp . net and check out Web Matrix. Its small ( about 1.3mb ), fast and meant for developing web based applications. It even comes with an database manager for msde.

It also looks like Microsoft has a new IDE out called Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. It looks like they have a version for every language that dotnet support as well as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. Does anyone know if these are free?

They are free if in BETA mode still....

also a free WINDOWS development env. would be "SharpDevelop"Check that out.


but for sure check out if the Visual studio is still in beta, it can be amazing. However it uses the .NET Framework 2.0 which is still buggy I find.

Lee

Originally posted by Aaton35
Dotnet is actually a great environment for the web, provided you use it with C# :-). Dotnet is meant to run like a Windows Application ( pre-compiled ) but via the web. Once your web application is compiled it doesn't have to parse like a scripting language ( php, vbscript ) does. This means that it "can" be much faster and more efficient. If you can get your hands on Visual Studio and get to know that, it also makes developing time much shorter. Dotnet gives you access to functions that will write much of the css and javascript you would have to manually write in other web languages.

If you are looking for a free dotnet programming ide, head over to www . asp . net and check out Web Matrix. Its small ( about 1.3mb ), fast and meant for developing web based applications. It even comes with an database manager for msde.

It also looks like Microsoft has a new IDE out called Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. It looks like they have a version for every language that dotnet support as well as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. Does anyone know if these are free?

there are free for now, because they are beta, I would not recommend to install them on a production machine, if you want to play with them you should run them on a testing machine, or a virtual machine.

There are part of the next version of Visual Studio, the express version is aimed to hobbyest developer, for getting serious you should get at least the Professional edition.

It's supposed to be available in November, it of course includes the new version of the .net framework (2.0),

btw, Microsoft giving something free? :emlaugh:

Quite True.
Although Web Matrix, although not specifically Microsoft, is free and is quite Microsoft like. I guess that is as close to "Microsoft Free" as it will ever get.

Originally posted by Aaton35
Dotnet is actually a great environment for the web, provided you use it with C# :-). Dotnet is meant to run like a Windows Application ( pre-compiled ) but via the web. Once your web application is compiled it doesn't have to parse like a scripting language ( php, vbscript ) does. This means that it "can" be much faster and more efficient. If you can get your hands on Visual Studio and get to know that, it also makes developing time much shorter. Dotnet gives you access to functions that will write much of the css and javascript you would have to manually write in other web languages.

If you are looking for a free dotnet programming ide, head over to www . asp . net and check out Web Matrix. Its small ( about 1.3mb ), fast and meant for developing web based applications. It even comes with an database manager for msde.

It also looks like Microsoft has a new IDE out called Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. It looks like they have a version for every language that dotnet support as well as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. Does anyone know if these are free?

for the current version of the framework (1.1) you can download webmatrix from gotdotnet.com or asp.net,

it's only for web development and doesn't provide language features, you can visually design a page and it will generate the code for you, but it will be inline code (like the all asp) not code behind that compiles separetely.

Not as good as visual studio but still a good tool that will allow you to do a lot more than a normal html editor.

Originally posted by Aaton35
Quite True.
Although Web Matrix, although not specifically Microsoft, is free and is quite Microsoft like. I guess that is as close to "Microsoft Free" as it will ever get.

see my post above.

I forgot about webmatrix because since I use visual studio i don't really care, and I like to code myself. I haven't tried webmatrix but I heard it works quite well.

re: free stuff and open source, Microsoft is quite clever with that, in fact there is a huge developers community that share code on different developers sites, Microsoft is not directly involved but they do support it.

Gotdotnet is a perfect example, the site was set up by Microsoft, there are some engineers from MS that post there regularly, but it's like an extra thing for them, it's not part of their work in MS, there are message boards, articles, etc. and links to other sites.

MS won't give you the windows or office code, but they make a big effort for developers to share code and they also give a big deal of help through msdn.

Recently they released something they call Microsoft Enterprise Library, they are basically code snipnets using best practices form some common tasks that programmers don't always understand or do right, such as data access, caching, encryption, etc.

MS thinks it's in its own best interest to educate and help developers since a big part of the problems with windows are created by poorly written applications.

I agree. I personally use Visual Studio. I dabbled with Web Matrix but I feel if I am going to develop for a Microsoft environment I might as well suck it up and pay for the software. Visual Studio just makes it so much easier...

I'll check out the Enterprise Library. Thanks.

Originally posted by Aaton35
I agree. I personally use Visual Studio. I dabbled with Web Matrix but I feel if I am going to develop for a Microsoft environment I might as well suck it up and pay for the software. Visual Studio just makes it so much easier...

I'll check out the Enterprise Library. Thanks.

no problem, I've been programming in .net for about 3 years now, and I discover new things every day.

I don't know if there is another programming environment so comprehensive, you have virtually everything.

The best known parts are Windows and Web applications (ASP.net), but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Image processing, encryption, socket programming, XML web services, reflection, text manipulation. shell programming, WMI programming, they are just a few examples.

With C# you can even get into very low level programming, unlike Java, C# allows you to use pointers (you have to take some steps for that but it's not a big deal), you can interact with the native api if you need speed (for example gdi+), you can also download several sdk that are .net compatible, such as direct x if you want to develop games for example, or the passport sdk.

It's really a huge platform that allows you to do nearly anything, the only type of applications MS doesn't recommend the use of C# are operating system functions or hardware drivers, because C# requires the framework to load on top of the OS, but you still have C++ for that (part of visual studio).

To comment on Ricardob's C++ and C# thing, although c++ is apart of the suite, it is still .NET, it is a managed platform. So ( as I am sure you know as you seem to have some experience with .NET ) VB.NET, C#.NET and C++.NET are all the same in the end... all compiled down to MSIL. so there is no difference using c++ or c# or whatever.NET..

just a question

has anyone programmed using sockets with c# in MONO? I wrote an application that uses SSL tunneling, and can not get it working in MONO, now I know I can sit here and wait for mono to work, but maybe there is a work around if someone has done thing in mono?

Originally posted by SuperSac
To comment on Ricardob's C++ and C# thing, although c++ is apart of the suite, it is still .NET, it is a managed platform. So ( as I am sure you know as you seem to have some experience with .NET ) VB.NET, C#.NET and C++.NET are all the same in the end... all compiled down to MSIL. so there is no difference using c++ or c# or whatever.NET..

just a question

has anyone programmed using sockets with c# in MONO? I wrote an application that uses SSL tunneling, and can not get it working in MONO, now I know I can sit here and wait for mono to work, but maybe there is a work around if someone has done thing in mono?

that's not strictly like that, it's true that all managed languages (including those not supplied by MS such as Cobol.net)'s compilers generate msil, the languages do have instrinsic differences. There are certain things you can do with C# that you can't with VB, eg, use pointers. Some of the new language features, such as generics or iterators are only available in C#, but in general, you can interchange the languages pretty well with no problems, and more important, you can reference a .dll written in C# from a VB application for example.

Regarding your question, no, I have no experience with mono at all, sorry I can't help.

MS WebMatrix (yes it is an MS product) is perfect for people just learning .NET and for people with smaller websites. I say good for people with smaller sites as all the code is stored in the aspx files and so is compiled server-side when a page is requested. With VS.NET youre able to compile your code into a dll file so the server doesnt have to do this itself... you dont really see much difference until you see it on a large scale though.

asp.net forums are a great place to ask questions.

Does anyone know of any good FREE e-books on VB.NET