Introduction

Welcome to the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Guided Tour.  We are excited to share key new features available in Visual Web Developer 2005 Express (hereafter, VWD) that will make Web development easier and more productive than ever before.

The Guided Tour is not intended be a comprehensive overview of VWD.  However, after completing the Guided Tour you will be well on your way to building your own sophisticated Web sites without writing any code.  What once took a Web application team days or weeks to complete will take you minutes.  There is no better way to learn about VWD than to actually use the tools, so the balance of the Guided Tour is showing you how to build your own solutions.

When building VWD, Microsoft's efforts were focused on increasing developer productivity.  Key development activities that you once performed on almost every Web application are now part of VWD.  For example, Internet Web site security is now completely rolled into VWD so you do not have to build your own security framework.

Assumptions

It is assumed that:

• You have already installed VWD and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (hereafter, SQL Express).  SQL Express is not a requirement to use the Guided Tour, but you will not be able to use some of the caching capabilities only supported by SQL Express.
• The intended audience are Web developers not familiar with VWD, and, potentially, any prior version of Visual Studio.

Note that installing a separate Web server (such as IIS) is not required when building applications with VWD.