First off, before you even to try to this exercise, Make sure you have read the article What is ASP? and understand. And if you understand it, then you should know that you have to have a server to run ASP scripts. So, if anything I have said confuses you, go back to the article What is ASP?

 Now that is out of the way. Let's begin.

Part 1:
Create My First ASP Page

START YOUR PAGES

Open your favorite text or HTML editor. It can be FrontPage, NotePad, FireWorks, Arachnophilia, etc... It don't matter.

Start off with your basic HTML page with any colors and such that you want but save the page as first_asp_page_part1.asp

STARTING AND ENDING ASP SCRIPT

Now we will start writing actual ASP scripts. To start ASP you have to use <% and likewise to end ASP codes you use %>

Simple Right?

COMMENTS

My first major rule in ASP coding to is leave yourself notes, so you if you come back later, you know what that part of the codes does. This has always been proper programmer etiquette. In ASP, this is called A "Comment". To initiate a comment, use the apostrophe mark followed by your comments. Comments can only be used inside ASP brackets. Otherwise, it will be displayed on the page as HTML coding.

DIMENSIONING VARIABLES AND COMMENTING

Many times later in your ASP progress you will use variables which you can define to be anything. Unlike VBScript on your computer, the newer ASP servers do NOT required variables to be dimensioned. However, using the dimension function allows you to add comments about that variable.

There are some predefined variables as well.

Let's start by Dimensioning our variables. Let's do a variable called MyVariable to hold some information. You can call it anything you want.

And using what we learned above, we will add a comment to remind us later what that variable is exactly. In large applications, the becomes very useful when going back and trying to work on the code.

Notice I haven't given the variable MyVariable a data type as you may traditionally do in VB programming. This is because VBScript only has variant as a data type.

GIVE A VARIABLE A VALUE

Now that we have a variable, Let's define it to be some text. You could of course define to be anything other than just text. Later you will learn how to get data out of databases and etc...

DISPLAY A VARIABLE USING RESPONSE.WRITE
Now that the variable has a value, to display it, we will use the Response.Write statement. I have used this statement thousands of times in my ASP Programs.

You can use Response.Write to also insert normal HTML codes will in the middle of an ASP script. Let's go back, and add some html before our variable to add lines and a font style and size.

However, usually font tags begin <font style="verdana" size="1"> but you can't use " because that will denote the end of Response.Write so there are two ways to fix this problem.

Double Quotes "" or use an apostrophe mark '. I will show you both.

'Start a font tag and use double quotes Response.Write ("<font face=""Arial"" size=""2"" color=""#000000"">")

Let's go back, and add some html before our variable to add lines and a font style and size.

'Close the server script %> </body> </html>

CONGRATULATIONS!!! Now, you have completed part 1 of 6 Learning ASP 101 by AaronOutpost.com. Here what your final code should look like. Open Viewable Example Continue to part 2: ASP With HTML