Hello World June 22, 2008
Posted by tuse in : Tools , 2 commentsIf you know nothing about VB.NET and ASP.NET, do not worry.
A month ago, we didn’t know too.
But now I can say that we are decent enough to create a few applications for the Windows platform.
These are the tools you’d need-
- Microsoft Visual Studio - The main Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used to create the applications. A free Express Edition is available directly from Microsoft which is best suited for student developers. You can get it here . We use Visual Studio 2008 Professional (Its a 90 day trial) which comes with the added power of Crystal Reports- something that we will discuss in posts to come.
- MySQL- If you are working with a lot of data you will need to keep it in a structured manner- in a database. We used MySQL. Why? Because its open source and more importantly, its free. Visual Studio comes with native support for SQL Server and certain configurations are needed to connect to a MySQL database. This will be a topic of discussion which will prove to be of a lot of use to many.
- Apache Server- As you might be aware, pages created with ASP.NET are run on a server. For testing on our local computer, we used the Apache server (again open source and free). Since the asp pages are intended to run on Windows Servers only, we did need to tweak a few settings here as well. (Don’t worry, we’ll explain these soon)
- WAMP - Well we didn’t have to bother downloading MySQL and Apache seperately. That is beacuse we used WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP). It is a Windows web development environment which comes with Apache and MySql (and PHP). You can get it here. And yes, its free too.
So I guess once you are done with the downloads we are good to go.
