HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Web sockets - provides asynchronous communication between the web page (browser)
and the server. Once the connection is established, the server can send real-time updates
to the client. This will be demonstrated in Chapter
13
.
Choosing a Development Tool
There are several development environments that you can use to create ASP.NET applications that take advantage
of the HTML5 features. I will present them here briefly and cover them in a little more detail in subsequent
chapters. The key thing to know is that there are some free alternatives to Visual Studio.
Using Visual Studio 2012
Visual Studio 2012 is the premier development environment for building ASP.NET applications. I won't say much
about it here as I will be using it predominantly throughout this topic to demonstrate HTML5 implementations.
However, if acquiring Visual Studio is cost prohibitive, there are some free alternatives that will still allow you to
work most of the exercises in this topic.
■
You can also use Visual Studio 2010 for most of the exercises. Make sure you have installed Visual Studio SP1
and then install MVC 4, which is available as a separate, free download. There are improvements in Visual Studio 2012
that will be helpful, but you can still accomplish much of the work using a properly configured 2010 environment.
Tip
Using Microsoft's Web Matrix
Microsoft's Web Matrix is a lightweight IDE that is specifically targeted for building web sites. While not limited
to just ASP.NET pages you can build full-fledged ASP.NET applications. It includes SQL Server Compact, which is
a file-based version of SQL Server. It also uses IIS Express to host a local web site for debugging. This is the same
hosting environment provided in Visual Studio 2012, which replaces the ASP.NET Development Server used in
previous versions of Visual Studio.
The ASP pages are based on ASP.NET MVC version 3 and use the Razor view engine. Consequently the file
extensions are
.cshtml
(or
.vbhtml
if you're using VB). The classic ASP model with an .
aspx
markup file and
separate .
cs
code-behind file is not supported, however. You can create .
aspx
files but adding a code behind file
is not a practical option. Also, as of this writing, it uses .NET version 4.0 and does not support version 4.5.
You can download and install Web Matrix, version 2 from this site:
■
As of this writing Version 2 was still in Beta. for a description of the Version 2 features see the article at
Note
