Before you can do ASP.NET, you must know Html and JavaScript (CSS doesn’t hurt either) – level 100

I’m not going to make this post a rant, but for anyone readers who are new to ASP.NET and have not come from Website development or ASP, there are some prerequisites to ASP.NET.  ASP.NET is a server-side technology that dynamically emits Html and JavaScript.  Now, you can stumble through an ASP.NET HelloWorld sample without knowing any web technologies, but you won’t be able to do anything with it afterwards.  The Microsoft ASP.NET newsgroup is full of people who ask questions about “ASP.NET”, but their question is really about Html, script or CSS.  For instance: “How can I set focus to a textbox on load of the page in ASP.NET?”  That has NOTHING to do with ASP.NET.  It’s simply running some script on the body’s onLoad event.  So the point I want to get accross is to isolate in your mind the Html, script and CSS from ASP.NET, and make sure you know the web front end before you dive into ASP.NET.