The previous tutorials showed you how to install the applications we need, how to interface with Visual Studio, the basics of programming, and the basics of using program logic. This tutorial will take those previous examples and use them to create a real-world web application. In this case we'll be focusing on something relatively simple: a guest book. The specific items we'll be covering are database access and object oriented programming.

Almost any web application you will ever develop will need a way to store persistent information. Basically any information you don't want lost with the session will need to be stored somewhere permanent. This permanent location is the database. We'll be using Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 to store all our persistent information.

Also known as OO or OOP, object oriented programming is a way to make programming complicated things a lot easier. You may not know it, but C# is a fully OO language. All that has been done in previous tutorials has been object oriented. However, we haven't taken advantage of any of the benefits of object oriented programming until now. Initially OO may be intimidating. However, in the end you'll see the benefits and realize that, in reality, OO is no harder than any other type of programming and, in fact, it's easier in many regards.

The OO concepts aren't going to be something we'll be focusing heavily on. As we play around with the database access I'll slowly introduce the concepts to you. It should all make sense as we go along. So let's go ahead and begin.