ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution (Programmer to Programmer)

Books Details :

Author : Marco Bellinaso
Paperback: 600 pages
Publisher: Wrox (May 8, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 0764584642
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches




Book Description
ASP.NET 2.0 Programming: Problem Design Solution is aimed at describing, designing, and implementing a site much like the ones you’re probably working on or will be soon, while taking the opportunity to introduce and explain many of the new features that the new great ASP.NET 2.0 framework offers. Difficult problems are addressed head-on so you'll be ready for most of the problems you’ll typically face when writing a modern website, and have one or more solutions ready for them.

Unlike many other ASP.NET books that show examples for individual pages or features, the example in this book is an integrated end-to-end site (written in C#). The entire book and site has been written specifically for ASP.NET 2.0, to use the ASP.NET 2.0 features wherever they make sense.

The end-result is a website which features a layout with user-selectable themes, a membership system, a content management system for publishing and syndicating articles and photos, polls, mailing lists, forums, an e-commerce store with support for real-time credit card processing, homepage personalization, and localization. The book leads the reader through development of a site with:

1. Account registration, personalization and theming
2. News and events, organized into categories
3. Opinion polls
4. Newsletter
5. Forums
6. E-commerce store with shopping cart and order management
7. Localization

Administration of a site will be covered including:

1. Full online back-end administrative section, to manage practically all data from an intuitive user interface
2. Site deployment

In building these site features, you'll learn these new ASP.NET 2.0 features:

1. Master pages
2. Theming
3. Personalization & Web parts
4. Membership & Profile modules
5. Personalization
6. The new server-side UI controls such as GridView, DetailsView, FormView, Wizard, MultiView, the new xxxDataSource and navigation controls, among others.
7. The new compilation mode and deployment modes
8. The new framework for instrumenting the site, as well as handling & logging exceptions
9. The new ADO.NET 2.0 features (e.g. caching with database dependency)
10. The new classes for easy distributed transactions Management

From the Back Cover
Completely rewritten and fully updated for ASP.NET version 2.0, this example-driven book describes from start to finish how to design and implement in C# a complete ASP.NET 2.0 website that contains many of the features that you can expect to find in a modern content-related and e-commerce site: forums, polls, newsletters, article management, e-store and much more. Each chapter introduces new controls and features of ASP.NET 2.0 so that you can comfortably read the material even if you haven't yet immersed yourself with the 2.0 release.

The self-contained chapters first present a problem to be addressed, then discuss the design features needed to solve the problem. After you've established how to resolve the problem, you'll use hands-on practice and code to execute the solution. In the end, you'll have integrated all the new abilities of ASP.NET 2.0 into a single site boasting rich functionalities.

What you will learn from this book

• How the built-in functions of the 2.0 release reduces the amount of code you'll need to write
• Unique and resourceful ways to handle various problems you face daily during the development of any website
• How to implement new features including themes, membership, personalization, localization, master pages, web parts, and caching
• Mastery of many of the new server controls including GridView, DetailsView, MultiView, Wizard, Menu, SiteMap, and Login

Who this book is for

This book is for programmers with a working familiarity with ASP.NET 1.x, although you are not required to know ASP.NET 2.0.

"This book is different from most others you can find in bookstores. When you consider performance, security, robustness, scalability, and care for details, Marco's TheBeerHouse sample application is more real-world than most real-world sites I have seen recently. In fact, as of this writing it's the best demonstration of ASP.NET 2.0's new features."
—From the foreword by Francesco Balena, founder of .Net2TheMax, author, and Microsoft Regional Director

About the Author
Marco Bellinaso is a partner of Code Architects Srl, an Italian company that specializes in consulting, mentoring, development, and training for the Microsoft platform. He works as a senior consultant and developer, and has a particular interest in all “web-things.” He focuses on designing and implementing large web sites with a variety of Microsoft products and technologies, including SharePoint 2003, MCMS, and, of course, ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. He’s been working with the .NET Framework since the Beta 1 on applications of all types, including Web Services, Windows Forms, and Windows Services. He is also author or co-author of a number of commercial tools for developers, such as the award-winning VBMaximizer add-in, CodeBox for .NET, and FormMaximizer for .NET. Before the .NET era, Marco was a hardcode VB developer who specialized in Windows programming with advanced, low-level API techniques, as well as a COM and ASP developer.
Prior to this book, Marco co-authored a number of other Wrox Press books, including Fast Track ASP.NET, Visual C# .NET: A Guide for VB6 Developers, Beginning C#, and the previous edition of this book for ASP.NET 1.1. He also frequently writes for programming magazines such as MSDN Magazine, MSDN Online, Visual Studio Magazine, and other Italian magazines such as Computer Programming and Visual Basic & .NET Journal. He is one of the principal developers and editors behind www.dotnet2themax.com, a popular web site for .NET developers that was sired by the even more famous www.vb2themax.com site for VB6. Besides writing, he also does a lot of public speaking (both in English and Italian) at some of the most important Italian conferences organized by Microsoft Italy and other big companies.
If you want to contact Marco to talk about the book, about beer and pubs, or about work-related questions, please use the form on his site (www.dotnet2themax.com) or his blog (www.dotnet2the max.com/blogs/mbellinaso).

Editorial Review
This book is different from most others you can find in bookstores. Most offerings in this area are mainly reference books that dissect every little detail of version 2.0 of ASP.NET or the .NET Framework and that – in the best cases – provide a short listing to illustrate each feature. Marco’s book has a radically different approach: he explains how you can assemble all ASP.NET 2.0’s features and leverage its power to design, develop, and deploy a full-featured Web site. Don’t be fooled by the TheBeerHouse being a fictitious site for a fictitious customer: if the main differences between a sample application and a real-world Web site are the performance, security, robustness, scalability, and care for details that you expect from a commercial site, then Marco’s TheBeerHouse is more real-world than most real-world sites I have seen recently.

In fact, unlike most real site authors, Marco was able to take all the time he needed to implement an impressive list of features and fix all the bugs he bumped into. And unlike most sample application authors, he never took a shortcut and never ignored the problems that developers have to solve every day in the real world. For sure, the overall quality exceeds what you might expect from a mere “book sample” and, as of this writing, it’s the best demonstration of ASP.NET 2.0’s new features, including Microsoft’s own starter kits.

From a teaching perspective, the great value of this book is the rationale underlying all the design and implementation decisions taken in the development phase. Marco does more than just describing what he did: he lists the pros and cons of all the alternatives he tried out and explains how he found the perfect solution (or the best compromise) to each problem. It’s like having an expert sitting besides you, able to read your mind, and ready to fix your mistakes before you have a chance to make them. Can you ask for more? -- Francesco Balena, author of widely popular Microsoft Press books.

Spotlight Reviews :

Reviewer: Thomas McNamee (Tucson, AZ USA)
Wow, I wish this book had come out 18 months ago! After learning a bewildering array of 'new' technologies (mostly old technologies with new names), I still struggle when it comes time to actually produce a .NET project. The reason? There is so little context around these technologies it is hard to understand why I would use them, even if I understand how.
Site Mapping is actually a navigation solution! How can I decide when to use the cache? Should I really go to the trouble of writing a DAL? I'm never going to switch this site to Oracle. The User Management stuff is impressive, but is it overkill? Or underpowered?
This book provides at least partial answers to these questions, and many more like them.
If Wrox would create more like this, I would buy every one. The Help file tells me how. Most books give me the theoretical why. ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming gives me the practical why, from the point of view of delivering a real-life project.

Reviewer: Melvin W. Grubb "Solutions Architect" (Columbus, OH USA)
Let's get one thing straight. If you're looking for a reference book, this isn't it. Marco doesn't explain every property of every control that you MIGHT want to use. He explains the most common properties of those controls that you probably ARE going to use, and that's a good thing. I've got my share of 1000+ page Wrox reference books, and they're great for looking up specific items, but not so great for learning.

A comparison is in order. If this were a cookbook, you wouldn't find dissertations on the relative merits of different cooking oils, or obscure recipes requiring ingredients you can't get at the local grocery store. This is the cookbook in which you'll find basic breads, pot roasts, and pastas... the staples that you WILL need at some point. It also includes some dishes you didn't even know you needed until you see them the first time. That makes this book a great place to start learning ASP.Net programming, or a useful walk-through to lead you from v1.1 to v2.0. Either way, it's a great book to have around during the transition.

I also see myself coming back to this book down the road when I need to implement one of the common situations Marco covers such as sending out batches of newsletters, or leveraging the asp.net membership system. I'll be saying "Hey, didn't Marco do that in his book?", and pulling it off the shelf for a quick look.

Reviewer: Currito (The beautiful Spain)
I had already bought 3 books about ASP.NET 2.0, and I have many many more about ASP.NET 1.x, before I bought this one...and now I wish I took it sooner! Yes, because this book is no like anything else. All other books I read provide detailed reference to the controls and classes of the framework...and they may actually do a good job at that. However, they often provide un-realistic short examples that span a page or two...too simple to actually reproduce real situations, and in fact most of the times these examples leave you thinking: "well, this is nice, but my app is not that simple...how can I really put this in practice into a real website...that must be fast, easy to maintain, provide logging, designed with the proper 3 tier architecture, reusable components etc. ". If you've ever thought something like this reading another book, then this is book IS THE ANSWER. It explains how to develop an entire (and pretty complex actually!!!) site from start to finish, convering not only the code, but also all the design phase, with a lot of interesting considerations, suggestions, and discussion of alternatives! It's a dream come true for a developer like me :-)
For those that are at their first experience with ASP.NET 2.0 (but NOT with ASP.NET in general...read something else first if you're coming straight from ASP or some other technology) it also provides good descriptions of the major new features (master pages, themes, membership, profiles, gridview, objectdatasource, menu & sitemap, webparts, localization etc. etc.)