Would I ever need to care about XML or HTML?

After downloading Visual Web Developer 2005 Express and reading the free book and watching the free video I still canot answer this question:
Would I ever need to care about XML or HTML?
Can I possibly build a decent website by using ONLY the Visual Basic Language inside Visual Web Developer 2005, without ever getting into the spaghetti like code of XML or HTML?
Is this possible or do I need to also learn XML and HTML?

Hi,
if you want to become a better webdeveloper it's certainly worth learning html and css. You can find practical small courses athttp://www.w3schools.com/
Grz, Kris.
PS: where did you get that free book you mentioned?

XIII wrote:

PS: where did you get that free book you mentioned?

When you register 2005 you will get an email with the link to the portal on it that has the book (PDF), and some other handy free tools.

Just by Downloading the new Visual Web Developer and registering it you get the free Videos and the Free Book:

"Visual Web Developer Build a WebSite Now"

With Visual Web Developer you can build and use an SQL database without ever touching XML or HTML.

I guess the consensus is that I will be able to at least build 99% of a website using only the new controls in the toolbox and VB code.

Last Question:

Can an application developed inside VB2005 be run inside a web site without having the user to download it first? Do the code need to be modified first?

Yes and no. For web applications to work, the client has to download something. It could be just the results, controls, or the application itself, but something has to be downloaded. It's how the internet works. Now, you can put most of your code on the server side, and just send the user the html output. This is how most websites operate. However, if you need to do more, then you need to let the client download everything. Just note that you can't use VB for client code, as you don't know if the client operating system can or will handle it.

heavenly wrote:

Can an application developed inside VB2005 be run inside a web site without having the user to download it first? Do the code need to be modified first?

Hi,
ASP.NET is a server side language meaning that it executes on the server, renders html and sends this to the client's browser. The browser that retrieves the html builds it up in a visually way. The extra things like normal html pages, images, css, some flash file could also be retrieved from the server and displayed along with it.
So yes, you could create great applications with just ASP.NET without knowing about html and css or xml. But I would like to advice to you to learn at least the first two. It's not difficult and you'll benefit from it and will become a better webdeveloper. Also take a look at the starter kits that are available for download. In my free time I took the opportunity to take a quick look at the Personal web starter kit and it looks well implemented at first glance. Try to reverse engineer it and figure out why and how they did it. You'll get some ideas from it.
Grz, Kris.
You better not group XML with HTML, they are TOTALLY different technologies, with 2 totally diferent uses.
That being said, basic html knowledge will come with just writing stuff in VWD 2005, XML is extreemly powerfull for lots of reasons, and its gaining popularity, all the new versions of microsoft products will be seperating the data from the application that created it by using xml data.
XML is well worth learning.
Actually, XML and HTML are related. HTML is a form of XML, and follows all of XML's rules and syntax. The only difference is that HTML was just too forgiving in the past. One of the reason xHTML was created: to correct all the original mistakes. Thus, knowledge of XML will benefit every web developer. :)