Part 1: Goals, Target Audience and Requirements

This series of articles is intended for the experienced developer wanting hands on experience using a range of .NET technologies. Although we will look at a range of technologies, the principal language used in the examples will be C# (C Sharp).

In order to complete the tutorials in these articles you will need a number of things.
1) Access to an IIS 4.0 or 5.0 server that you can reach using Front Page Server Extensions. I am using IIS 5.0 installed locally on Windows 2000 Professional.
2) Any version of Visual Studio .NET (VS). The examples are done using the Enterprise Architect version but it isn’t needed for any of the tutorials. If you use a different version of VS then some of the screen shots may look slightly different than your screen. Installation of Visual Studio .NET will also require installation of the Windows Component Update which adds the .NET Framework, ADO .NET and more to your system.
3) Later tutorials are going to require a database. My examples will be done using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 installed locally.

Don’t worry about this being too much for your system. I wrote most of these on my Windows 2000 Professional, Dell laptop PIII 650 MHz, 128 MB RAM runs Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect, Visio, Rational, MS SQL Server 2000, DB2-UDB, Apache-Tomcat, JBoss, JBuilder 5 Enterprise, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and about 15 GB of other junk.