Sams Teach Yourself ASP.NET 2.0 in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit

In this hour, we will cover

• Looking in detail at the web pages that make up the online photo album application

• Creating a master page for the photo album site

• Adding dummy pages to the website project for each of the required pages

• Completing the majority of the ASP.NET pages associated with the application

• Adding common sitewide elements to the master page, including a site navigation control and a login Web control

Now that we've worked our way through the design phase, we're ready to start building our online photo album application! But what do we start with? What web pages should we create first? What's the best way to start implementing this project? When we're creating any software application, it often helps to break down the task into small, manageable, independent chunks, which is the tactic we'll be taking when creating this application. Rather than rushing in and creating the web pages to complete a particular use case, we'll first step back and survey the project as a whole, mapping out our plan of attack.

For web applications, the manageable, independent chunks of a web application are typically web pages. In the preceding hour we identified a number of web pages that would be needed: a home page, a login page, a page to display the categories and pictures for a specified user's album, and so on. By the end of this hour, we'll have a number of these pages complete.

Rather than aimlessly picking a web page and starting development there, I find it helpful to list the web pages that will make up the site and create the actual ASP.NET pages in the website. At this early stage, these pages don't need to have any functionality. The mere act of thinking about the website's pages, creating these dummy pages, and understanding how users will move from one page to another helps in selecting where to start the development process.

By the end of this hour, we'll have the majority of the site's ASP.NET pages finished and fully functional. Those pages that we do not get to in this hour will be examined and implemented in the next and final hour.