Hello World (Somewhat)

Lets start by opening Visual Studio. Please note that during this I am using Visual Studio 2010 Professional. You should be able to follow these posts using Visual Studio 2010 Web Express or Visual Studio 2008 Professional, but some of the code might be different.

After Visual Studio is open, go to the "File" menu and select "New Web Site..."

New Web Site under the File Menu

After you click "New Web Site..." the "New Web Site" dialog will appear:

The New Website dialog.

Visual Studio provides a few options when creating a new web site. You can choose the location where you want your web site saved, the language you want to use, such as C# or VB.NET and the project template you want to use. I just saved this website in a new folder called "HelloWord". Name yours whatever you want. Select the language you are most comfortable with and choose "ASP.NET Web Site" from the templates list and then "OK".

After a few moments Visual Studio will have created a new ASP.NET website for you in the location you decided. If look in your Solution Explorer you will find that Visual Studio has created a lot of web site files for you already. Just take a few moments to look through them and then go click the "Debug" menu then "Start Debugging" or press F5 on your keyboard. If you get a message asking to enable debugging, just click "OK". Your website should load in your default internet browser.

Congratulations! You just made your first ASP.NET web site (kind of). Later, we will work with some actual ASP.NET coding and start our own website from scratch, not using any pre-built web sites.