C# A Programmer's Introduction, 1/e: Tour of the Book (Continued)

Chapter 17-ASP .NET, Web Forms and Web Controls

Previous chapters demonstrated how to create applications that execute locally on the user's computer. In this chapter and Chapter 19, we discuss how to create Web-based applications using Active Server Pages (ASP) .NET. This is a crucial aspect of .NET and of Microsoft's vision of how software should be developed and deployed on the Internet. ASP .NET is an integral technology for creating dynamic Web content marked up as HTML. (For readers who are unfamiliar with HTML, we provide a detailed introduction in Appendices G and H.) Web Forms provide GUIs for ASP .NET pages and can contain Web controls, such as labels, buttons and textboxes with which users interact. Like Windows Forms, Web Forms are designed using visual programming.

Chapter 18-Extensible Markup Language (XML)

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) derives from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), which became an industry standard in 1986. Although SGML is employed in publishing applications worldwide, it has not been incorporated into the mainstream programming community because of its sheer size and complexity. XML is an effort to make SGML-like technology available to a much broader community. XML, created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is used for describing data in a portable format. XML differs in concept from markup languages such as HTML, which describes how information is rendered in a browser. XML is a technology for creating markup languages for virtually any type of information. Document authors use XML to create entirely new markup languages to describe specific types of data, including mathematical formulas, chemical molecular structures, music, recipes and much more. Markup languages created with XML include XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language, for Web content), MathML (for mathematics), VoiceXMLT (for speech), SMILT (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, for multimedia presentations), CML (Chemical Markup Language, for chemistry) and XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language, for financial data exchange). The extensibility of XML has made it one of the most important technologies in industry today and is being integrated into almost every field. Companies and individuals constantly are finding new and innovative uses for XML. In this chapter, we present examples that illustrate the basics of marking up data as XML.

Chapter 19-ASP .NET and Web Services

Chapter 19 continues our discussion of ASP .NET. In this chapter, we introduce Web services, which are programs that "expose" services (i.e., methods) to clients over the Internet, intranets and extranets. Web services offer increased software reusability by allowing services on disparate platforms to interact with each other seamlessly. This chapter presents an interesting example of a Web service that manipulates huge integers (up to 100 digits).

Chapter 20-Networking: Streams-Based Sockets

Chapter 20 introduces the fundamental techniques of streams-based networking. We demonstrate how streams-based sockets allow programmers to hide many networking details. With sockets, networking is as simple as if the programmer were reading from and writing to a file. The example provided in this chapter demonstrates using streams-based sockets to communicate between two C# programs.

Chapter 21-FCL Collections

This chapter discusses the prebuilt collection classes in the .NET Framework Class Library. These collections classes store sets, or collections, of data and provide functionality that allow the developer to sort, insert, delete and retrieve data items. Different collections classes store data in different ways. This chapter focuses on classes Array, ArrayList, Stack and Hashtable, discussing the details of each.

Chapter 22-Accessibility

The World Wide Web presents challenges to individuals with disabilities. Multimedia-rich Web sites are difficult for text readers and other programs to interpret; thus, users with hearing and visual impairments may have difficulty browsing such sites. To help rectify this situation, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which provides guidelines for making Web sites accessible to people with disabilities. This chapter provides a description of these guidelines, such as the use of the headers element to make tables more accessible to page readers, the alt attribute of the img element to describe images and the combination of XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), to ensure that a page can be viewed on almost any type of display or reader. We illustrate key accessibility features of Visual Studio .NET, Internet Explorer and Windows 2000. We also introduce VoiceXMLT and CallXML, two technologies for increasing the accessibility of Web-based content. VoiceXML helps people with visual impairments to access Web content via speech synthesis and speech recognition. CallXML allows users with visual impairments to access Web-based content through a telephone.

Chapter 23-Mobile Internet Toolkit

The demand for wireless applications is growing rapidly. By 2003, the number of people browsing the Web from wireless devices will exceed the number browsing from desktop computers. The Mobile Internet Toolkit (MIT) extends Visual Studio .NET by providing a set of FCL classes for creating mobile applications. We introduce Mobile Web controls and Mobile Web Forms that can be used to create ASP .NET applications that target a wide range of mobile devices.