MTA Microsoft Technical Associate (Exam 98-361) Web applications

Index

1. Web Page construction
2. Understanding ASP.NET
3. Hosting Web sites
4. Intro Web services

1. Web Page construction

The origin of web pages was to store documents and move from one to another easily. Over time, Internet has evolved and now you are able to find more functionalities and different services but all of these web pages are built with three main languages you should know:

• uses HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, here the developer includes the structure of our documents. It defines the position of every element you can see in a web page.
• uses CSS: responsible of the look of any page. Here we can talk about inheritance between the different groups defined in our html page that's why it takes the name of Cascade Style Sheet.
• uses JavaScript (JS): gives functionality to our web page on the client side (because sometimes we don't want to go back to the server for "small things"), by creating links to other resources, user messages, data validation and a lot of new and real time functions if you are using frameworks like jQuery for instance.

All this information (HTML + CSS + JS) is interpreted by web browsers and served to the user but not all the browsers make the same interpretation of the same code. This is a problem and HTML5 is not an exception. There are some tools to make our life easier like modernizr, which allows you to know which functions are enable in the current user's browser. To see the code of any web page you just need to make right click in every web page and choose an option similar to "view source code" to get a new window with all this information

2. Understanding ASP.NET

This component is a part of our web site that it will be processed within the server before we send the web page to the user. You get more functionality in your web pages by using asp.net allow you to use your web as a normal application with: server-side web framework, provides dynamic content, uses HTML and code-behind, hosts (Internet Information Service IIS) web applications on a server and provides data connectivity (Microsoft SQL Server)

When use asp you can create your own classes in your web project like in a normal console/desktop application. Besides you can add code (VB/C#) directly within your web pages using asp syntax (aspx or razor syntax). This means you will be able to run loops, add variables, call methods and all within your HTML page, which gives great functionality to your future web projects.

3. Hosting Web sites

This is a very important point because when you finish your first web application you will need to host it (save&serve it) in a server that allows you to run asp web pages (if that was the engine you worked with). At this point, IIS takes a really important role due to is going to be en charged of running that application and serve it to the users. During your development you probably faced "IIS Express" running in your windows clock, that is a small version of a current IIS within a server.

4. Intro Web services

A web service is hosted in a web server ;) and typically it does not have any interface to interact with. A example of web service is one created by several weather forecast web pages, which allows developers to access some pieces of code where you can pull useful information like temperature, forecast and weather for a certain town/city. This web services could be interfaces that are implemented by some classes and we, as clients of that web service, we can use that functionality directly. There are a lot of services in the net like Google maps, coordinate, image recognition, even beer location!!!

Cheers!