In this tutorial we will learn how to send e-mails of both text and HTML formats using classes of System.Web.Mail namespace. Before delving in to the source code, I'll briefly explain the MailMessage and SmtpMail classes which we'll be using to send e-mails.

ASP.NET is a new and powerful technology for writing dynamic web pages. It's a convergence of two major Microsoft technologie's, Active Server Pages (ASP) and .NET. ASP is a relative old-timer on the web computing circuit and has provided a sturdy, fast, and effective way of creative dynamic web pages for more than five years now. .NET is the new kid on the block and is a whole suite of technologies designed by Microsoft with the aim of revolutionizing the way in which all programming development is conducted in the future and the way companies carry out business. Therefore, as a conjunction of the two, ASP.NET is a way of creating dynamic web pages while making use of the innovations present in .NET.

Last time around we installed all the prerequisites and finally even ASP.NET. Now that that's done, you can start writing ASP.NET pages of your very own. This time around, we walk you through your first one. Way back when programming was new, someone decided that the first thing you should do whenever you start programming in a new environment or language is print out "Hello World." I have no idea who it was that came up with this idea or why it stuck, but it has. Not being one to fight the system without reason, we'll be using this incredibly simple idea as the basis for our first ASP.NET page.

Now that we have developed our website, we need to deploy it – prepare and distribute the site so that users can access it. The release of ASP.NET forces us to reconsider many preconceptions about the deployment of websites. For example, we need to get used to the possibility of running multiple copies of the same site on a single server, sharing different versions of identically named DLLs. Another thing that developers might find incredible is XCopy deployment, which allows a developer to deploy an application by simply copying files to the target location. There's no need to use the Registry or any complex COM registration.

Microsoft's .NET technology has attracted a great deal of press since Beta 1 was first released to the world. Since then, mailing lists, newsgroups, and web sites have sprung up containing a mixture of code samples, applications, and articles of various forms. Even if you're not a programmer using existing ASP technology, it's a good bet that you've at least heard of .NET, even if you aren't quite sure what it involves. After all, there's so much information about .NET, that it's sometimes hard to filter out what you need from what's available. With new languages, new designers, and new ways of programming, you might wonder exactly what you need to write ASP.NET applications.