Create a simple Web form page

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Create a simple Web form page
Stephen Walther

In a former tip, we discussed the Web form as an object. Now we go a bit further into a discussion of Web forms with this tip, excerpted from InformIT, which offers a discussion of how to create a Web form page for your project. The tip also offers two examples, one in C# and one in VB, of code that will create the Web form page.

We'll start with a simple Web Form Page. We'll create a page that randomly displays a fortune.

You should add a Web Form Page to an existing ASP.NET project. We [do that as follows].

• Select Project, Add Web Form.
• In the Add New Item dialog box, enter the name Fortune.aspx for the Web Form in the Name text box.
• Click Open.

Now that you've created a Web Form Page, you can add server controls to the page from the Web Forms toolbox. We'll add a Label control to the page by performing the follow steps:

• If the Toolbox window is not already open, select View, Toolbox.
• Drag a Label control onto the Designer surface from under the Web Forms tab in the Toolbox.

The next step is to add some application logic to the page. We want to retrieve a random fortune from an ArrayList of fortunes and display the fortune in the Label control. To do this, perform the following steps: Double-click the Designer surface to switch to the Code Editor.
Enter the following code for the Page_Load() method:

 
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
 // Put user code to initialize the page here
 ArrayList colFortunes = new ArrayList();
 Random objRan = new Random();

 colFortunes.Add("Good things will happen!");
 colFortunes.Add("Future looks bright!");
 colFortunes.Add("Stay in bed!");

 Label1.Text = colFortunes[ objRan.Next( 3 ) ].ToString();
}

Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, 
ByValue As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
 'Put user code to initialize the page here
 Dim colFortunes As New ArrayList()
 Dim objRan As New Random()

 colFortunes.Add("Good things will happen!")
 colFortunes.Add("Future looks bright!")
 colFortunes.Add("Stay in bed!")

 Label1.Text = colFortunes(objRan.Next(3))
End Sub

Finally, we are ready to compile and view our Web Forms page. Right-click the Web Form in the Solution Explorer window and select Build and Browse. The Web Form Page will be opened in a browser and you should see a fortune. Whenever you click the Refresh button, a new fortune is randomly selected and displayed.

TIP
If you receive an error when building your code, select Build Solution from the Build menu. A list of errors in your code will pop up in the Task List window. You can double-click an error to go directly to the error in your code.

To read the article from which this tip comes, click over to InformIT. You have to register there, but the registration is free.

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