What software you need
Here’s a quick summary of the software you need to develop ASP.NET web applications with Visual Basic .NET.
- To develop any VB.NET application, you need to be working under Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional. (You can make do with Windows XP Home Edition, but only if you have access to a separate IIS server computer to test your applications.)
- To run ASP.NET applications on your own PC, you need to install the
IIS web server. IIS comes with all versions of Windows
2000 and with Windows XP Professional (but not with
the Home Edition).
- To use VB.NET, you need to install either Visual
Studio .NET or Visual Basic .NET. Although Visual
Studio .NET includes additional languages and features,
you can do almost everything that’s in this book
with the Standard Edition of Visual Basic .NET, which
is far less expensive. The only limitations to Visual
Basic .NET are that it doesn’t include (1) Web
Control Project libraries, which are covered in chapter
17, (2) Crystal Reports, which is covered in chapter
18, and (3) Setup projects, which are covered in chapter
20.
It doesn’t matter whether you
use the 2002 or the 2003 version of the .NET software.
The book applications will run on either one.
- To run database applications on your PC (as opposed to using a database server on a network), you also need to install MSDE on your PC. MSDE is the desktop database engine that comes with Visual Studio 2002. Although it isn’t included with Visual Studio 2003, it can be downloaded for free from Microsoft’s web site.
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