ASP.NET 2.0: A Developeramp;#039;s Notebook [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

How This Book Is Organized

ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's
Notebook is organized in eight chapters, with each chapter
focusing on a particular set of new features in ASP.NET. In some
chapters, the labs can be read independently of each other; in
others, it is more logical to read through the labs in sequence, when
the material in each lab builds on the previous one. In any case, the
examples are structured so that you can learn the concepts very
quickly by following the steps outlined.

In Chapter 1, I walk you through the new steps
you follow with Visual Studio 2005 to set up ASP.NET 2.0 web
applications, and then highlight some of the changes in the new
development tool. I also discuss some of the most interesting
controls that are new to ASP.NET 2.0. In addition, ASP.NET 2.0 comes
with some neat improvements to the old ways of doing things, such as
cross-page posting, inserting client script into the page, and more.
These new improvements are also covered in this chapter.

In Chapter 2, you will learn about Master
Pages, a new feature supported by ASP.NET for visual page
inheritance, which is similar to Windows Forms inheritance. With
ASP.NET 2.0, you can now create a single Master page that contains
the common elements used by the pages of your site. You can then
create web pages that inherit from the Master page, to enforce a
common look-and-feel across your entire site. In addition to Master
Pages, you will also learn how to use the new navigational controls
in ASP.NET 2.0. These controls, known as SiteMapPath and Menu, allow
you to add navigational links to your site without much coding.

In Chapter 3, you will learn how to create
portal web sites using the Web Parts Framework. Web sites today
contain a wealth of information, so much so that a poorly designed
site can easily overwhelm users. To better help users cope, portal
web sites (such as MSN) often organize their data into discrete units
that support a degree of personalization. Information is organized
into standalone parts and users are allowed to rearrange those parts
to suit their individual working styles. Such personalization also
lets users hide parts that contain information in which they have no
interest. What's more, users can save their settings
so that the site will remember their preferences when they return. In
ASP.NET 2.0, you can use the new Web Parts Framework to build web
portals that offer this kind of modularization of information and
personalization.

In Chapter 4, you will learn to use new
controls that reduce the coding necessary to do data access. Data
access is one of the most common tasks that you're
likely to perform when you write web applications. This is evident in
the number of new data controls that ship with Visual Studio 2005.
One of the most important is the new GridView control, which is a
much improved version of the venerable DataGrid control of previous
versions (the older DataGrid control is still supported in ASP.NET
2.0, though). In addition, ASP.NET 2.0 ships several new data source
controls that make it easier to consume a variety of data sources. In
this chapter, you will learn how to use the various new data
controlsGridView,
DetailsView, and
DataListtogether with the new data source
controls, such as SqlDataSource,
ObjectDataSource, and
XmlDataSource. With all these controls, data
access is now much easier than before, and you can spend more time
working on your business logic.

In Chapter 5, you will discover the new
security controls in ASP.NET 2.0 that aim to simplify the life of a
developer. Using these new security controls, you can now perform
user login, registration, changing of password, and more, with no
more effort than dragging-and-dropping controls onto your web form.
Powering these new controls are the Membership APIs, which perform
the mundane tasks of user management without you having to write your
own code. In this chapter, you will learn how the use the new
security controls to secure your site. You will also learn about the
Membership APIs and how they can be used to perform user
administration.

In Chapter 6, you will learn about some of the
productivity improvements in ASP.NET 2.0. For example, in ASP.NET
1.x, because pages are dynamically compiled and cached the first time
a user loads a page, an ASP.NET 1.x web application is typically
slower the first time it is loaded. In ASP.NET 2.0, you can now
precompile a site so that it's already compiled when
the first user links to it. ASP.NET 2.0 also supports fragment
caching, which means that you can cache parts of your page rather
then the entire page. Consuming web services is also made easier with
the automatic generation of a web proxy class based on a WSDL
document. Simply drop a WSDL document into the
App_Code folder, and the web proxy class will be
automatically generated. Finally, ASP.NET 2.0 includes the Client
Callback Manager, which allows you to update your page with
information from the server without performing a postback.

In Chapter 7, you will learn how to create
personalizable web sites using the Profile service. Personalizing
your web site enhances the experiences of your users, by preserving
information about visitors so that it can be reused when they come to
your site again. In ASP.NET 2.0, the new Profile service gives you a
way to store information about your users.

Finally, in Chapter 8, you will learn about how
you can maintain a consistent look-and-feel for your web site using
themes and skins. In this chapter, you will learn about the new
Themes and Skins feature in ASP.NET 2.0 and how you can use it to
maintain a consistent user interface for your application. In
addition, localization in ASP.NET 2.0 has gotten easier with the new
auto-culture handling mechanism. You will learn how to create
applications that support multiple cultures.