Crash Course to Web Development for FoxPro and Web Connection Developers

This event took place on Thursday, January 1, 2009.

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THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED

Crash Course to Web Development for FoxPro and Web Connection Developers
Instructor:  Rick Strahl of West Wind Web Connection

This course is an introduction to .NET Web Development for FoxPro developers with some focus on similarities and differences familiar to West Wind Web Connection developers. This 3 day event starts with a short introduction to .NET and C# language features and then dives into a pragmatic presentation of how to build a Web Application with ASP.NET. Primary focus will be on ASP.NET Web Forms although we will also discuss the alternate MVC platform and its similarities to class Web Connection template functionality. During the course of this event we'll also cover data access approaches, application architecture issues as well as Web Services.

Students may attend either in the EPS offices in Houston, TX or live online with GoToMeeting.

Topics Covered

The course starts out with a brief introduction to C# and .NET to give a brief overview of the most common concepts required to work with Web applications. FoxPro developers are already versed in object oriented concepts and .NET merely adds a few additional features on top of what Fox developers are already used to. Note: A basic understanding of .NET languages and the .NET framework will be very helpful in this course although it's not required.

Next the course covers .NET and ASP.NET architecture relevant to Web Development. ASP.NET is a broad platform that provides both low level and high level features and is infinitely customizable at most levels. This topic gives an overview of what the engine provides and the high level technologies that run on top of it such as Web Forms, MVC and Web Services.

At this point we'll start looking at building an application and discuss creating a business layer. In this session we'll look briefly at how base data access works using ADO.NET and then discuss how to abstract the wordy ADO.NET data access into a data access layer and a business object framework. We'll use LINQ to SQL and SQL Server for the data access along with a wrapping business layer.

The next step involves getting our hands dirty by creating a small application. We will demonstrate the basics of creating a Web project and using the various Web project types available and how to set up configure, run and debug Web applications. We'll start with the basics of creating simple pages and  work our way up to creating more complex pages that will make up a small business application built mostly from scratch.

In the process of building this application we'll discuss many related topics - state management for Web applications, how to take advantage of client side features using jQuery to build applications that are more interactive and pointing out similarities and differences to the Web Connection framework.

There will be significant time spent discussing integration of ASP.NET with jQuery and client side programming to create interactive applications as well as effectively using CSS to simplify layout and styling of your applications.

The application development will focus primarily on the Web Forms engine which matches closely to the Web Connection Web Control framework. We'll also take some time to examine the alternate MVC engine which takes an entirely different approach to Web development and which is more similar to Web Connections classic template and Process class based approach.

To top things off we'll also spend some time discussing how to create Web Services using .NET along with how to easily consume Web services using .NET. There are two main approaches available class

This course is taught in interactive author led demonstrations that are either created live on the spot or walk through existing examples. Audience participation drives some of the direction of these samples and participation is highly encouraged.

Recommend Prerequisites:
Some FoxPro object orientation skills
Some FoxPro Web Development (optional)
Some basic .NET and C# language skills helpful

Every Student Receives:
Slide Deck
Source Code
Downloadable recordings of all the sessions
Certificate of Completion
Free CODE Magazine subscription