If you've gotten this far, you're probably ready to begin writing some code. Before beginning, make sure that Visual Studio 2005 is installed on your machine. As long as you've installed the development environment, you can be sure the .NET runtime support is installed as well.

The first few examples will require nothing but a text editor and a working installation of Internet Information Services. To start, we'll begin with some basic examples to illustrate ASP.NET's object-oriented nature and compilation model. In addition to letting you see exactly how ASP.NET works when handling a request, this is a good time to lay out ASP.NET's architecture from a high level. We'll progress to Web form programming and soon begin using Visual Studio to write code (which makes things much easier!).

After learning the fundamentals of Web form development, we'll break apart the rest of ASP.NET, using examples to understand ASP.NET's features such as server-side controls, content caching, writing custom handlers, caching output and data, and debugging and diagnostics, all the way to ASP.NET's support for Web Services.