Lesson 1

Microsoft Visual InterDev, part of Microsoft Visual Studio 97 and 6.0, was an IDE used to create web applications using Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) technologies. It used code completion, database server management tools, and an integrated debugger.
The extensive InterDev IDE was shared with Microsoft Visual J++, and is the precursor to the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Visual Web Developer (integrated into Visual Studio) and Visual Web Developer Express have replaced InterDev in the Visual Studio suite of tools.
In the following modules we will be using Visual Studio 2017 along with ASP.net to build dynamic websites.

The Web offers interesting pages where you can do your shopping, research just about any topic, make travel arrangements, buy and sell stocks, or even hold a virtual auction.
The ease of navigating through the Web to conduct these online activities conceals the complex engineering that goes on behind the scenes. A good example is shopping for a new car. The Web site of the manufacturer lets you view any model in any color, and read about performance, options, and prices. You can even custom select your favorite model with the desired options and get the sticker price, right down to the penny.
Then you can do some comparison shopping by going to another Web site and finding a dealer with the best price in your area.

Sites such as this frequently query and display data from large databases. This data includes

1. text,
2. images,
3. audio, and
4. even other Web pages.

Most Web sites today incorporate some type of database, from something as simple as text files to very large relational database systems. Data is what the Web is about. We build Web sites to provide data to our users as well as get data from them in return. Web pages and data are practically synonymous.
This module introduces you to basic database concepts that you will need to understand before adding database functionality to your Web applications created with Visual Studio. By the time you finish this module, you should be able to do the following:

1. Identify table structures used in relational databases
2. Identify common database systems
3. Recognize ODBC, ADO, and other database access solutions
4. Explain what SQL is and what it does
5. Insert a data source into a project
6. Bind a database to an environment

In the next lesson, the storage of data will be discussed.