ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

Foreword

The opportunity to write a foreword is always a great honor, and when the author is someone you have worked elbow-to-elbow with, it's more than an honor; it's a great pleasure! As readers, you are probably eager to get into the following chapters, and aren't particularly interested in when and how I met Marco, but I believe this story is worth telling.

In late 1990s I started www.vb2themax.com, a web site that quickly became popular among VB6 aficionados. After a few months, Marco began to e-mail me his articles, and it was soon clear to me that he was a smart developer who also had the rare gift of being able to put his experience down in words.

After a couple of years, I decided to write a commercial VB6 add-in and asked Marco to give me a hand. Marco accepted, and in a few months we would launch VBMaximizer, a product that was later voted among the best productivity tools by the readers of Visual Basic Programmer's Journal (now Visual Studio Magazine). The noteworthy detail of this story is that Marco and I worked on this project exclusively via e-mail, without even talking to each other on the phone. I never needed to explain to him what I needed, and, unbelievably, the code I got from him was virtually defect-free at the first attempt! At the time I didn't know that Marco was only about 20 years old; otherwise, I would have been far more impressed!

I physically met Marco a few years later, and since then we have worked together on many other software projects. I ...