In this chapter, you learned what a Content Management System is and why ASP.NET is a good technology to use in developing a CMS. We walked through getting installed the Internet Information Services, the ASP.NET 3.5 framework, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. We also configured a development environment to use VWD and IIS on our system.

The very basic CMS sample we programmed in this chapter shows the basics of a CMS system. We have a storage area for content—the file system and a file named Content.txt in this case. We have a mechanism for an average user to edit this content, using the FCKEditor control. And we have the code that reads our Content.txt file and writes changes back to the same file. This is what makes a Content Management System work—the ability to store and recall content, the ability to change the content without programming skills, and the permanent retention of content when it is not being accessed.

The final code for this chapter can be downloaded from Packt's official web site. The full code is slightly different from that presented in this chapter in that it is commented for you to understand. This chapter started from scratch, but future chapters will build on this base. Therefore, you will find that the starter code for many of the chapters can be downloaded as well.

In the next chapter, we'll add a database to our CMS as the storage mechanism, allowing us far more flexibility in storage than the file system does. In future chapters, we'll take this rather plain looking site to new design levels, add a security system so that users will only be able to perform tasks they have permission for, and build some more useful content management functions into our application. So, if you're ready, we'll get started with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express.