Microsoft Expressions Web - Understanding How to Work with ASP.NET

I want to begin by briefly talking about the differences between Static Webpages and Dynamic Webpages. What you see on the screen in front of you is a Static website. It's a series of flat html pages with no Dynamic content, just a collection of flat files linked together. By the way, if you have watched any of my other training videos, you have probably already seen 'The Chocolate Game' website, and you know that one of my missions in life is to teach everyone I can, how to play The Chocolate Game.

So indulge me for a minute before we get to the really tacky stuff, I want to make sure you take a quick look at the instructions for 'The Chocolate Game'. Essentially, it's all about getting the Chocolate in your mouth without your hands. And more than anything, it's about keeping the Chocolate off the floor, okay? Let's look at the site where we are actually going to be working on in this series, and talk about what you can do, when you combine the power of a website, with the power of Database, so let's close out of this.

Now I am going to open the site we will be working on throughout the series, and use it to give you an overview of what we will be learning. If you want to follow along, you'll find it, if you choose File Open in Expression Web, you want to Open site, and you will find it located on the Desktop in your Project Files folder in Lesson01, and it's called Snug As a Bug. So open that, and then let's open the front page of this site which is called default.aspx. So just double-click to open default.aspx.

Before I start I want to warn you that if you don't have SQL Server Express installed on your system, and you don't have Expression Web's Development Server turned on, you may not be able to preview these pages yet, don't worry, I will show you how to set all of that up at the end of this Lesson. In the mean time, all you need to do for now, is just sit back, relax, and let me show you around the site and introduce you to asp.net.

Now you should be able to tell right away that this site is created in asp.net, because of this .aspx extension at the end of the file name. That 'x' distinguishes this site from an asp site, and lets you know its asp.net. And I want you to know too, all of the pages and features that are in this site were created in Expression Web. But this site is quite different from the one we were just looking at. For example, here in the main part of this front page, you see the words Databound and you see this SQLDataSource here, but you don't actually see the content displayed in Expression Web, that's because it needs to be pulled dynamically from the Database for you to see it, and that requires both the development server that came with Expression Web, and a Browser. So let's Preview this page in a Browser, and notice here this little bubble comes up showing me that the asp.net development server is working, you can close that.

So all of the pages in this website are asp pages, and all of them with the exception of the Who We Are page, have some kind of dynamic content on them. In fact, if you were paying attention, you might notice, I am back on the home page, and there is different content displayed. You might also be wondering why all the Real Estate Agents look like insects? But this is a sample website for the purpose of this training, and yes, all of the Real Estate Agents are insects, most are butterflies in fact, and if I press the F5 key on my keyboard here, and refresh this page, you will notice that I have set up not only to display contents from the Database on this front page, but to randomly change that content every time the page is loaded. That's the kind of dynamic feature that makes asp.net so cool. Another great advantage of Database driven sites like this one, is that they are muck more efficient about how they handle content when you want to display it in multiple places in the site. So for example, if I click on the Agents page, you'll see I have a list of all of my Real Estate Agents here. But if I click on any of my Agents names, you will see that I also have specific pages for each of those Agents. What I want you to notice here is that I have links from this page with all of the Agents going to the pages with each agent, that the content this text that represents the name, and this image are exactly the same on both of those pages, they are being drawn from the same Database. And one of the advantages of that, is that if you find someone's name is misspelled for example, or their cell phone number changes, again, instead of having to change that data on every page where it may appear on the site, you can simply change it once in the Database, and automatically update it everywhere it appears. You can even set up your asp pages to make it possible for Users of your site to update the content themselves.

So for example, on my Listings page, if I click on one of these properties, let's scroll down to the very last one, my Ultra Modern Listing, and if you see at the bottom of the Ultra Modern example, it says, Sign In to Edit this Item, and all of the Listings have this option. It's a feature I created with asp.net.

So imagine that I am empowering my Real Estate Agents to be able to come here themselves, and update the Listing. All they need is a User Name and Password, you don't want to let just any insect update this site. I am going to type in Charlotte Webb, please forgive some of the fonts in this site, and the Password, if you are testing this version is, Password all lowercase, followed by an exclamation point. There is a requirement in the system that you will use in Expression Web, that the Password include at least seven characters and a special character, like a punctuation mark. So Password exclamation point, and you can Log in, oh, you don't need to remember it for me, thanks, thanks Internet Explorer.

Now I noticed at the bottom of this page, I have an option to Edit this Listing, and when I get here, I can change the Name, so I could call this Ultra Modern Disc Home, and may be I have thought of some other way to describe it, at the end of that Description I could add, 'Lots of storage space'.

Now watch this, when I click Update, and then I go back to my Listings page, that change is immediately reflected on the pages in the website and in the Database File. So if I click on the Name to go to the page that has the detail, you see those words that I added, and that extra Description appear here, just as they appear on the Listing page itself. So let's close out of Internet Explorer and come back to Expression Web, and let's look at a couple of other aspects of how this site is built that really facilitate easy Updates and Redesigns.