Initial Thoughts

A lot of the information at the beginning of this chapter was not really new to me. The history of the world wide web, HTML and XHTML, and web browsers had been covered already in HTML. I didn’t know that Mozilla Firefox is actually an open source version of Netscape and found that to be pretty interesting. The client-side and server-side scripting information was new to me. Using Visual Studio is familiar to me from the Visual Basic class I took last semester, and seems pretty intuitive. This class seems to fit well into the overall scheme of web development. My current course of study is computer support and networking, and I think that I’ll enjoy broadening my horizons a little bit with this class.
If someone were to ask me what a web programmer was I would probably say that a web programmer is the person who creates applications that run behind the scenes on web pages. I would give some examples, such as animations, search engines and shopping carts for online stores. I would also say that the reason someone would want to become a web programmer would be that they enjoy problem-solving, creating applications, and deploying them in web pages.

.NET Languages

In this chapter, I learned some basics of C#. Some was very similar to Visual Basic, but some of it was very different. I learned how add C# code into web pages, and what happens on the server side when these pages are requested. Basically, every ASP.NET web page should have the file extension .aspx. When the server gets a request for a web page with that file extension, it sends the page to a scripting engine, which processes the code and returns the results.
I read a few articles online while researching C# and Visual Basic. According to the articles, C# and Visual Basic are functionally the same. Visual Basic has slightly better support while using Visual Studio than C# does. It seems as though the biggest difference lies in the syntax. C# is described as being similar to Java. One article described C# as being more terse. There were some pretty biased articles, mostly supporting usage of C#. This being said, I haven't had much practice with C# and would therefore prefer using Visual Basic. However, that viewpoint could easily change after gaining some more experience with C#, so instead of choosing sides right now, I think I'll stay on the fence until I've gotten to use C# some more!

Back to Top

Chapter 3 Reflection

As with the other chapters so far, there were some areas of Chapter 3 that were similar to thinks I learned in VB, and there were also some new things. The repetition and selection structures were very similar to VB and I don't think that it will take much time to get used to the slightly different syntax in those areas. It seems as though there are quite a bit fewer words but more symbols, which was the area that I had issues with this chapter. In fact, there were a few times that I had to stare at my code for a bit trying to find out where I missed a curly bracket here and there. I enjoy doing the end of the chapter assignments more so than the exercises throughout the chapter. I am more apt to learn by actually having to figure things out as opposed to being shown exactly how to do something. All in all, the most interesting thing that I learned in this chapter was the Request object, and using it to pull information off of the forms for usage or display elsewhere.

Chapter 4 Reflection and Page Life Cycle

In this chapter, I learned about web forms and server controls. Server controls can be similar to HTML controls, but run on the server and can be manipulated with ASP.NET programs. I learned how to use specific events to call functions and methods. I also learned how to use the CompareValidator control to ensure that the user actually entered data, and also that it is the correct type if needed.
Any ASP.NET page runs, it goes through a series of processing steps called the page's life cycle. Different things happen at different steps of the page's life cycle. Assuming that the page is being requested for the first time, the page's life cycle goes a little something like this:

Sources:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178472.aspx
http://www.asp.net/general/videos/page-lifecycle-events
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/Santhi.M/ASP.NETLifeCycle11282005043446AM/ASP.NETLifeCycle.a

Chapter 6 Reflection and IE9

In this chapter, I learned various ways to debug a faulty program. I thought that using the Response.Write statement to display different variables’ values could be very handy. I have also found commenting out certain lines of code to pinpoint a problem is useful. Tracing seemed a little confusing to me, though. The different windows that monitor variables and expressions also seems like a very good tool to use. Overall, there were a few new methods of debugging that seem very valuable.

After reading the review on IE9, I was intrigued to try it, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. I have been a faithful Firefox user for years, and have become very accustomed to using Firefox. I think that the larger page space was nice, its interesting that less than half an inch of space seems to make that much of a difference. Overall, the interface was very clean and minimalistic. I agree with the reviewer that it seemed pretty snappy, however I couldn’t really tell how much faster it was. I definitely liked this version better than the one that I previously had installed on my computer, but I’ll have to play with it some more before I can really say if I enjoy it or not.

Chapter 7 Reflection and Database Design

This chapter I learned about databases. I learned about relational databases, the differences between them, and why you would use one over another. I also learned how to use SQL Server to create databases, add tables, and add information to the tables. The book showed me some of the more common keywords that are used when working with SQL Server, and I found that I had to look up a couple more when doing the exercises. I learned about the syntax of SQL Server commands, and it seems pretty straightforward. I learned how to retrieve records from a database, and the different commands you use to do so. I also learned how to filter and order the records that are returned.

The article on database design and management was interesting. It went over the importance of designing a database well, and the different kinds of tables to use when designing a database. The article described how to evaluate dependencies and use that information to decide how many tables to use, and what information should be on each table. The most important thing I took from this article would have to be the fact that it is important to design a database well from the beginning to avoid having a mess to deal with later.

Chapter 8 Reflection and SQL Injection

Chapter 8 was all about how to access and manipulate databases with ASP.NET. I learned about the classes in the System.Data.SqlClient namepace, and what the classes do. SQLConnection is what provides access to a SQL Server Database, SQLCommand executes a SQL command against a SQL Server database, and DataSet is what represents data retrieve from a data source. I also learned about some different SQL server errors that can arise and how to handle them.

To be honest, I hadn’t ever really heard of SQL Injection before reading the short article SQL Injection and Parameterized Queries. It was interesting to read about, and I found it very informative. The use of parameters seems as though it is a pretty simple way to protect against SQL injection.