This book was written to introduce you to the features and
capabilities that ASP.NET 3.5 offers, as well as to give you an
explanation of the foundation that ASP.NET provides. We assume you
have a general understanding of Web technologies, such as previous
versions of ASP.NET, Active Server Pages 2.0/3.0, or JavaServer
Pages. If you understand the basics of Web programming, you should
not have much trouble following along with this book''s
content.
In addition to working with Web technologies, we also assume
that you understand basic programming constructs, such as
variables, For Each loops, and
object-oriented programming.
You may also be wondering whether this book is for the Visual
Basic developer or the C# developer. We are happy to say that it is
for both! When the code differs substantially, this book provides
examples in both VB and C#.
This book spends its time reviewing the 3.5 release of ASP.NET.
Each major new feature included in ASP.NET 3.5 is covered in
detail. The following list tells you something about the content of
each chapter.
-
Chapter 1, "Application and Page Frameworks." This
chapter shows you how to build ASP.NET applications using IIS or
the built-in Web server that comes with Visual Studio 2008. This
chapter also shows you the folders and files that are part of
ASP.NET. It discusses ways to compile code and shows you how to
perform cross-page posting. This chapter ends by showing you easy
ways to deal with your classes from within Visual Studio 2008.
-
Chapters 2, 3, and 4.These three chapters are grouped
here because they all deal with server controls. This batch of
chapters starts by examining the idea of the server control and its
pivotal role in ASP.NET development. In addition to looking at the
server control framework, these chapters delve into the plethora of
server controls that are at your disposal for ASP.NET development
projects.
-
Chapter 5, "Working with Master Pages."Master pages are
a great capability found in ASP.NET. They provide a means of
creating templated pages that enable you to work with the entire
application, as opposed to single pages.
-
Chapter 6, "Themes and Skins." This chapter looks at
how to deal with the styles that your applications require and
shows you how to create a centrally managed look-and-feel for all
the pages of your application by using themes and the skin files
that are part of a theme.
-
Chapter 7, "Data Binding in ASP.NET 3.5." One of the
more important tasks of ASP.NET is presenting data, and this
chapter shows you how to do that with ASP.NET controls.
-
Chapter 8, "Data Management with ADO.NET." This chapter
presents the ADO.NET data model provided by ASP.NET, which allows
you to handle the retrieval, updating, and deleting of data quickly
and logically.
-
Chapter 9, "Querying with LINQ." LINQ is a set of
extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated
query, set, and transform operations. This chapter introduces you
to LINQ and how to use this new feature in web applications
today.
-
Chapter 10, "Working with XML and LINQ to XML." This
chapter looks at the XML technologies built into ASP.NET and the
underlying .NET Framework to help you easily extract, create,
manipulate, and store XML..
-
Chapter 11, "IIS7." Probably the most substantial
release of IIS in its history, IIS 7.0 will change the way you host
and work with your ASP.NET applications.
-
Chapter 12, "Introduction to the Provider Model." A
number of systems are built into ASP.NET that make the lives of
developers so much easier and more productive than ever before.
These systems are built upon an architecture called a provider
model, which is rather extensible. This chapter gives an
overview of this provider model and how it is used throughout
ASP.NET 3.5.
-
Chapter 13, "Extending the Provider Model." This
chapter looks at some of the ways to extend the provider model
found in ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter also reviews a couple of sample
extensions to the provider model.
-
Chapter 14, "Site Navigation." Many developers do not
simply develop single pages-they build applications. One of the
application capabilities provided by ASP.NET 3.5 is the site
navigation system covered in this chapter.
-
Chapter 15, "Personalization.". The ASP.NET team
developed a way to store end user information-the ASP.NET
personalization system.
-
Chapter 16, "Membership and Role Management." This
chapter covers the membership and role management system developed
to simplify adding authentication and authorization to your ASP.NET
applications. This chapter focuses on using the
web.config file for controlling how these systems are
applied, as well as on the server controls that work with the
underlying systems.
-
Chapter 17, "Portal Frameworks and Web Parts." This
chapter explains Web Parts-a way of encapsulating pages into
smaller and more manageable objects.
-
Chapter 18, "HTML and CSS Design with ASP.NET." A lot
of focus on building a CSS-based Web application was placed on
Visual Studio 2008. This chapter takes a close look at how you can
effectively work with HTML and CSS design for your ASP.NET
applications.
-
Chapter 19, "ASP.NET AJAX."AJAX signifies the
capability to build applications that make use of the
XMLHttpRequest object. New to Visual Studio 2008 is
the ability to build AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications from the
default install of the IDE.
-
Chapter 20, "ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit." This
chapter takes a good look at the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, a
series of new controls that are now available to make AJAX web
development rather simple.
-
Chapter 21, "Security." This security chapter discusses
security beyond the membership and role management features
provided by ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter provides an in-depth look at
the authentication and authorization mechanics inherent in the
ASP.NET technology, as well as HTTP access types and
impersonations.
-
Chapter 22, "State Management." Because ASP.NET is a
request-response-based technology, state management and the
performance of requests and responses take on significant
importance. This chapter introduces these two separate but
important areas of ASP.NET development.
-
Chapter 23 , "Caching." Because of the request-response
nature of ASP.NET, caching on the server becomes important to the
performance of your ASP.NET applications. This chapter looks at
some of the advanced caching capabilities provided by ASP.NET,
including the SQL cache invalidation feature which is part of
ASP.NET 3.5.
-
Chapter 24, "Debugging and Error Handling." This
chapter tells you how to properly structure error handling within
your applications. It also shows you how to use various debugging
techniques to find errors that your applications might contain.
-
Chapter 25, "File I/O and Streams." More often than
not, you want your ASP.NET applications to work with items that are
outside the base application. This chapter takes a close look at
working with various file types and streams that might come into
your ASP.NET applications.
-
Chapter 26, "User and Server Controls." This chapter
describes building your own server controls and how to use them
within your applications.
-
Chapter 27, "Modules and Handlers." This chapter looks
at two methods of manipulating the way ASP.NET processes HTTP
requests: HttpModule and HttpHandler. Each method provides a unique
level of access to the underlying processing of ASP.NET and can be
powerful tools for creating web applications.
-
Chapter 28, "Using Business Objects." You are going to
have components created with previous technologies that you do not
want to rebuild but that you do want to integrate into new ASP.NET
applications. Beyond showing you how to integrate your COM
components into your applications, this chapter shows you how to
build newer style .NET components instead of turning to the
previous COM component architecture.
-
Chapter 29, "Building and Consuming Services." This
chapter reveals the ease not only of building XML Web services, but
consuming them in an ASP.NET application. This chapter then
ventures further by describing how to build XML Web services that
utilize SOAP headers and how to consume this particular type of
service.
-
Chapter 30, "Localization." ASP.NET provides an
outstanding way to address the internationalization of Web
applications. This chapter looks at some of the important items to
consider when building your Web applications for the world.
-
Chapter 31, "Configuration." This chapter teaches you
to modify the capabilities and behaviors of ASP.NET using the
various configuration files at your disposal.
-
Chapter 32, "Instrumentation." The ASP.NET framework
includes performance counters, the capability to work with the
Windows Event Tracing system, possibilities for application tracing
, and the most exciting part of this discussion-a health monitoring
system that allows you to log a number of different events over an
application''s lifetime.
-
Chapter 33, "Administration and Management." This
chapter provides an overview of the new GUI tools that come with
APS.NET that enable you to manage your Web applications easily and
effectively.
-
Chapter 34, "Packaging and Deploying ASP.NET
Applications." This chapter takes the application building
process one-step further and shows you how to package your ASP.NET
applications for easy deployment.
-
Appendix A, "Migrating Older ASP.NET Projects." This
appendix focuses on migrating ASP.NET 1.x, or 2.0 applications to
the 3.5 framework.
-
Appendix B, "ASP.NET Ultimate Tools." Based on Scott
Hanselman''s annual Tools pick blog posting, many of the tools here
will help you to expedite your development process and in many
cases, make you a better developer.
-
Appendix C, "Silverlight." This is a means to build
fluid applications using XAML. This new technology enables
developers with really rich vector-based applications.