Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

How This Book Is Organized

Here is a summary of the chapters in this book and what you can expect from each:

Chapter 1, Web Development in 2008

Provides a short introduction to how .NET has grown between v2.0 and v3.5, and in which areas it will continue to grow.

Chapter 2, Visual Studio 2008

Explores Visual Studio 2008 and its new features since the previous version, and shows how you can use them to create ASP.NET applications.

Chapter 3, Controls: Fundamental Concepts

Introduces the five types of control you’ll use to create an ASP.NET website, and how they differ from each other. This chapter also introduces the concept of events and postbacks on a page.

Chapter 4, Basic Controls

Looks at all the text-, image-, and list-related ASP.NET Server controls and AJAX server controls installed by default into Visual Studio 2008. The chapter also looks at some of the controls in the AJAX Control Toolkit that extend the functionality of the basic controls.

Chapter 5, More Controls

Looks at more advanced ASP.NET Server controls and AJAX server controls installed by default into Visual Studio 2008, including the Panel, UpdatePanel, Wizard, FileUpload, and Calendar controls.

Chapter 6, Website Fundamentals

Shows you how to use the code behind a page effectively, and how to manage state in the otherwise stateless Web. This chapter also describes the life cycle of a web page in detail and shows you how to take advantage of advanced directives.

Chapter 7, Data Source Controls and Connections

Looks at the ASP.NET data source controls, how to use them, and which sources of data can be used with which control.

Chapter 8, Using Data-Aware Controls

Explores the various data-bound controls supplied with ASP.NET 3.5, including the new ListView control. This chapter also demonstrates how they use the DataSource controls shown in Chapter 7 to both retrieve and save data.

Chapter 9, ADO.NET

Shows you the technology underlying the controls described in Chapters Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, so you understand how it all works and can take precise control when necessary.

Chapter 10, Presenting LINQ

Looks at the brand-new LINQ API, how it can be used to query and join diverse sources of data, and how to make use of it within ASP.NET pages.

Chapter 11, Validation

Demonstrates the various ASP.NET server controls dedicated to validating the contents of a form to ensure data consistency and protect against spoofing.

Chapter 12, Forms-Based Security

Describes in detail how to implement forms-based security to constrain user access to your website over the Internet. In addition, this chapter demonstrates how to use either the default (SQL Express) database for this or how to create your SQL Server database and use that instead to create users and roles (groups) and to facilitate authentication and authorization.

Chapter 13, Master Pages and Navigation

Describes some of the features that help you build professional-quality web applications. Master pages allow you to create a uniform look and feel throughout your application, and the navigation controls allow you to build site maps, menus, and breadcrumbs quickly and easily to facilitate navigation of large applications.

Chapter 14, Personalization

Shows you how to allow your users to tailor the look and feel of your site to their own requirements, and how to store that information so that when users return, the site remembers their preferences and state.

Chapter 15, Custom and User Controls

Covers the powerful yet easy-to-use technology that allows you to extend ASP.NET to create controls customized for your specific problem domain.

Chapter 16, Web Services

Looks at how to create and consume both ASP.NET and WCF web services, how to enable them in an AJAX environment and the various standard protocols used for services and their clients to talk to one another.

Chapter 17, Caching and Performance

Lays out the various ways that some or all of an ASP.NET page can be cached on the server and the different toggles that will require it to be deleted from the cache and regenerated.

Chapter 18, Application Logic and Configuration

Looks at how information can be stored at the application level and how the web.config file can be used to alter the operating parameters of your website. In particular, you’ll see how to use IIS 7.0 and the Web Site Administration Tool (WAT) to alter web.config and then how to create custom sections of web.config for your own specific use.

Chapter 19, Tracing, Debugging, and Error Handling

Examines the various ways to detect errors during development in ASP.NET, and how to handle errors that occur in your production code.

Chapter 20, Deployment

Looks at three different ways to deploy your website: by copying the site’s file directly with XCOPY, by wrapping it up into an installer with a Web Setup Project, and finally by deploying it as a part of the build process with a Web Deployment Project.

Chapter 21, Epilogue: From Now to vNext

Last but not least, this chapter takes a brief look at the various .NET 3.5 web development-related beta projects currently available for download.

Appendix A, Installing the AJAX Control Toolkit

Demonstrates how to install the AJAX Control Toolkit used throughout the book.

Appendix B, Relational Database Technology: A Crash Course

Introduces the key concepts needed to use relational databases, such as SQL Server, used in this book.

Appendix C, Keyboard Shortcuts

Describes all the keyboard shortcuts enabled in Visual Studio 2008 under its Web Development default settings.