Are you interested in becoming a web developer? Maybe a web developer who uses Microsoft products to get it done? Are you interested in Microsoft’s ASP.NET? If so, here is another free development environment to help get you started. In my article 4 Programming Languages To Help You Become A Programmer, I talked about some of the free development environments from Microsoft to help you become a programmer. The Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition is free from Microsoft and allows you to:
- Design Web Pages using
- CSS
- JavaScript
- AJAX
- Build Data-Driven Web Sites
- Create Web Sites with ASP.NET Starter Kits
- Build Custom Facebook Applications
- Learn Web Development from A Beginner Developer Learning Center
ASP stands for Active Server Pages. This is Microsoft’s web technology to help you create web applications. The .NET part of ASP.NET comes from their .NET Framework that includes a bunch of programming code organized by what are called libraries.
Think of the .NET Framework as the underlying support system that houses are built on or buildings even. There are many processes, procedures, people and materials that go into building houses, buildings, city streets and sidewalks, bridges, etc. .NET is the equivalent then for building web sites as well as Windows applications.
Installing Visual Web Developer
The install for VWD took me about 15 minutes to install, if that. Below is the opening screen of Visual Web Developer.
Click image for larger view (1024 x 768)
Let’s create our first web application using Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.
Do The Following:
- Click on File -> New Web Site…
- Click on the ASP.NET Web Site
- Don’t change anything else for now and click OK
- A project will be created and display the following screen
Press Ctrl-F5 to run the web site. If everything went right, you should see something like the web site below. By the way, if you are familiar with web sites and the fact that servers are needed to run a web site, Visual Web Developer comes with its own web server software. Which is very cool because you don’t have to worry about the web server during development – it just runs when you need it.
That’s it!! You are now an official web developer. 
Pretty cool, huh? Ok, I know you didn’t write anything and nothing was displayed on the web page, but that’s how easy it is to get started with real results that might possibly spark that inner web developer to delve a bit deeper.
With the download and install which takes about 10 to 15 minutes and creating this first web application, and viewing it, probably took between 15 to 30 minutes.
More to come on Visual Web Developer 2008.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I never imagined it’s that simple. Is it really that simple? Probably there’s still tons to learn but with tons of information that one can find on the web, one will be able to self taught how to build a website. Pretty cool stuff.
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