Microsoft Expression Web - Looking at ASP.net and Data Binding Controls

Looking at ASP.net and Data Binding Controls in Microsoft Expression Web

If you want to do full ASP.net development, you can create dynamic web pages that deliver content directly from a data base. And this is by far the most efficient approach to web design. It will take you a little more time to set up, but in the long run, it is a great way to go. Although you cannot do ASP.net programming in Expression Web, you will find a number of data-binding features and the number of ASP.net controls that make ASP.net development even easier than having to write the programming yourself. Let me show you a couple of those. I have moved all of my taskpanes to the other side, but this one popped up when I added that data source. This is a taskpane that lets you view the elements in your data source without having to open the original file. I am going to close that out of the way for now. But I want to show you something in the toolbox. The toolbox is one of the most important taskpanes in this program. At the top, it has some of the most popular HTML tags then it has form controls. These you would also use for static page development. And as you come down further, you will find standard ASP.net controls and you will find data-binding controls. These allow you to connect to access data bases or sequel data sources and again although, you cannot do the ASP.net programming in this tool you can use these data binding tools as short cuts for developing ASP.net sites. If you are working with the programmer or you like to do the programming yourself, you may be pleased to know that visual studio and Expression Web were designed to work together, they are fully integrated and you will even find parts of the interface that are exactly the same. So if you are working with the site that was created in visual studio, you can open that site and edit it in Expression Web and vice versa. If you want to make changes to the design of an SP page like this, it is a lot like working with the template. I cannot actually change anything here because it is a locked region but I can change it if I open the master page. Let us find out how can master page open that file and now if I want to make changes, say I want artisans to be a little whiter than it is grey. I can change the color right here and I can change the color on the left and I can change the content on the left, add other elements here, essentially anything that I want to change on the master page will apply to the other pages as I save it. But you will notice a difference here when you go to save the file. Instead of having to ripple those changes through our multiple pages, like when you change the template with a static site, it has to physically change all the other, these pages are rendered on to fly. So you will not see those effects, if I save I have to save the CSS file because I have made the change. But I will not get that other dialog setting that it needs to update all the pages created from this page. One last thing I want to show you before we end our overview just to touch more of the ASP.net options because they are so powerful. In the toolbox under the standard section, I also have a bunch of ASP.net controls. These are predesigned elements I can use in my page. So creating a calendar like this could be very complicated if I have to write the programming, but since it is built in to Expression Web, I can just click and drag it onto my page and have the calendar automatically appear as it will when it is viewed on the web. And I have some styling options built in. if I choose auto format, I can click through this different designs, choose one that matches the style of my site, click OK and Expression Web not only changes the look, it renders it, so I can see what it is going to be look like in my page. Now, when I save this and I go back to the pages that were created from this file, I should see the results of those changes, the way of artisans, and the new calendar at the bottom of my page. One of the biggest challenges in the past of working with ASP.net pages has been rendering them on your own computer, but watch what happens when I preview this page in the browser, this page is rendering because I have a development server installed in my hard drive that is helping me render all the elements on this page. You can use IIS for this, if you want to install a full server, but if you do not the little mini server that comes with Expression Web is more than enough to test your ASP.net pages locally and make sure your designs are working the way you want. So for example, I can see that I still have a little adjustment to make in the formatting here and maybe the length of this headline, before I am ready to shift this page out, but at least I can see that here and I do not have to use a full server to test it out. There is so much more you can do with ASP.net but I am going to stop here for now. I hope this first lesson has given you a good overview of what is possible with Expression Web. Remember, the first site we looked at, it was the Northern California Wildlife site designed with absolute position layers, so it has to be aligned to the left, but we had all kinds of advantages like absolute positioning down to the pixel control and even overlapping layers. Then we looked at the chocolate game, please do not forget how to play the chocolate game. This site was done with tables which made it very easy to center on the page but is not considered the best way to design websites like this, now that we have cascading style sheets. Then we look at another CSS design site, this one use div tags with relatives positioning and it also made use of the dynamic web templates feature in Expression Web, so that one change could affect all of the pages on this site and let us not forget that frame site where we saw all those cute pictures of my nieces, yes, these are my nieces. And as you scroll through, remember, as you click on each of these links it opens on the main window because we set that target when we set the link and finally we saw this ASP.net site where you got to see some of the dynamic development features in Expression Web. In the next lesson, we will get hands on and build this site from the blank page up using CSS layers.