All you need to make ASP.NET pages is a text editor (such as Notepad) or a
development tool (such as Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer) and
the compiler for whichever .NET language you decide to use (if you are using
a development tool this probably came with it). ASP.NET is not really a
language at all, but a subset of the classes in the .NET Framework that are
used to generate web pages. The most common .NET languages used to write
ASP.NET applications are VB.NET and C#.NET. In fact, you can actually use
both in the same application (although they will have to be compiled into
different assemblies). Hopefully this information answers your question, if
I misunderstood what you were asking, let me know and I will try to give a
better answer.
You only need a text editor to write it, but you need a web server to
run your ASP. Something to point your browser towards. Windows XP
comes with IIS built in for free which is more than capable of doing
the ASP processing but you will need to switch it on if it isn't
already.
If your looking for the tools to start developing and writing ASP.NET
now, then I suggest you get "Microsoft's Visual Web Developer Express
Edition". It's a really powerful development environment for writing
your ASP code in and when you hit the play button to test your code it
will start a debug-able web server and load your site into it, meaning
you can create a simple project, write and test out your first web
application in minutes. I'd highly recommend it. When you've finished
writing a serious site with the tool you can copy the website to a
real server running IIS for serving up your ASP Pages.
Good Luck,
Phill
