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Now in our previous video I did a little animation where I kind of talked about ASP.NET in action and I showed you a user requesting a page and what's happening on the Server and we'll go into more details and different aspects of that and even do some more animations later, but first, especially if you're new to this, for those of you who are coming to this brand new, I want to talk about what exactly is ASP.NET and then I'll even expand on this as we go through here, but to help you get your head around it, ASP.NET as it turns out is really nothing more than a Programming Framework for Web Applications. Now it is part of the Microsoft.net Framework, which we'll talk about in a separate video. For now you just need to understand that ASP.NET is a bunch of programming functionalities that are out there to let you build web applications. Now Web Applications is one of those terms that it's like what does that mean? It really means we're going to build a Dynamic Web site. A web site that's going to ask us questions; we can interact with it by clicking on buttons, by choosing drop-down lists, by inputting data and then this web site, from this Microsoft standpoint, is based on something that they call Web Forms. Now, really that's a Web page, but a Web page in the ASP.NET world has a number of pieces and parts and does all kinds of various forms of magic and technology to create this dynamic Web site. Now, the real bottom line of all of this, when you break it all down and for those of you who are experienced here and you've worked in some other technologies other than ASP.NET on the Web, you'll recognize this as simply Server-side processing. Now what that means is we're going to write code in a file that we present to the client side out on somebody's browser and based on what they do, based on what they choose, based on information they put into the Web page, they're going to click a button, a Send button, an OK button, whatever and this is going to tell the browser to push this back to the Web server and once it gets there there's going to be some sort of programming, ASP.NET Programming, that happens, that runs. Now this Server-side processing can also happen when the user first requests the page and so before the page request ever leaves the server some server-side processing happens and that just means we're going to run a program. ASP.NET also provides the capability for building and working with XML Web Services. Now if you know what these things are then you know exactly what I'm talking about, but if you're not familiar with XML Web Services don't worry about it right now. Get ASP.NET, just basic web sites and web pages and web forms and functionalities down and then we'll move on to Web Services and I will probably talk about Web Services a little bit toward the end of this course. It's really not a Web Service course, but we'll see how the times go and maybe throw it in there, some basics on it. Now, one of the cool things about ASP.NET is for the most part it's Browser Independent. We will get into that when we get into some of the Web Controls and so forth, but ASP.NET has a certain amount of functionality built in wherein it will actually check to see what kind of browser requested it and then it will render itself to appear in that particular browser. Now, before you go running into the street celebrating, let me warn you. This is not going to take care of all the Cascading Style Sheet problems that you have going from Firefox to Internet Explorer and different versions within those and all that stuff. So, make sure you didn't hear me say that, OK? This is Browser Independent to a certain degree, but you will see a lot of browser independence and it will save you a lot of code over some things that you've had before. And now this one's really kind of tough for people to get their head around sometimes. ASP.NET is Language Independent and that has to do with how the .NET Framework works, but the bottom line is, what language should I use to build these web pages? Should I use C#? Should I use VB.NET? Should I even use something else? And the answer is yes. The real answer is use whatever language you're comfortable with, that you understand. Now, I will tell you, if you're coming into this new I would strongly recommend either C# or VB.NET. Now let me warn you. Depending on who you talk to, depending on their background and a lot of things, you're going to hear some real strong opinions about this, but the bottom line is go with the one that is most comfortable for you. Go with the one that's easiest for you to learn and that makes sense for you. Trust me. Once you learn VB.NET you can easily transition to C# or vice versa, so if you have had any kind of formal training in the past, especially at the college level for like Information Systems degrees or anything, Computer Science degrees, you're probably want to go with C#. If you're kind of a taught yourself, or coming from the old VB6 world, or anything like that, you probably want to go with VB. Don't worry about it. You're not going to find out that you can't do certain things for quite a long time with either one of those languages, OK? So, you're not going to hit that wall too quickly. Now, all of this stuff together provides us what we know as ASP.NET. Now what's interesting is, once we open Visual Studio, or the Visual Web Developer for the Express version, the free version which I'll talk about later, once I begin to program these web pages I never think ASP.NET because I never type ASP.NET. ASP.NET is the family of technologies, or the Framework of programming technologies, that are used to build these things. So, just make sure you understand exactly what is ASP.NET and then we can get on to the next video here and move on through the course. But I just wanted to get you up to speed kind of on the nomenclature and help you to understand how these pieces and parts work together.