This book started as a project for California-based publishers Apress in December
2000. I began writing in January 2001 with the wildly optimistic goal of completing the book by August. Needless to say I didn’t even come close. In the following
months the market for books targeting new .NET developers became increasingly competitive, and unfortunately Apress were forced to cancel the project.

What you see before you is the state of the book as it was circa April 2002. Some
of the chapters have gone through the technical review and copy editing phases, others have not, so the quality within the book varies somewhat, and is far from professional. Some chapters are incomplete, and some don’t make an appearance at all. However, I figured I’d might as well compile what I have and release it rather
than continue to let the writing rot on my hard drive. Hopefully this e-book draft will be useful to people beginning with .NET, Web Forms development, or both.

Take note: this book was written before the release of .NET v1.1 or v2.0, and uses
Visual Studio .NET 2002. Fortunately not much changed between Visual Studio .NET
2002 and Visual Studio .NET 2003, so although all the screenshots in the book might look at little different to what you’ll see in the .NET v1.1 release version (and indeed Visual Studio 2005), most of the code and concepts should be very similar, if not the same.

I’d like to thank everyone involved in the project during 2001 and 2002. Gary, Karen, Dan, Nicolle, Grace, Tracy and everyone else at Apress, thanks for your efforts – I learned a lot from you all. And to everyone who read early chapter drafts
and gave me feedback, I really appreciate your words of advice and encouragement!
In particular I’d like to thank Mark Balasundram, Brad Simon, Jared Blanchard, Tom
Pester, David Palmquist and Marc Pienaar.

– Peter McMahon

June 2005                                             Page2