Saturday, March 21, 2009

ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution


Paperback: 600 pages
Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (May 8, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0764584642
ISBN-13: 978-0764584640
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches







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.

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:
  • Account registration, personalization and theming
  • News and events, organized into categories
  • Opinion polls
  • Newsletter
  • Forums
  • E-commerce store with shopping cart and order management
  • Localization
Administration of a site will be covered including:
  • Full online back-end administrative section, to manage practically all data from an intuitive user interface
  • Site deployment
In building these site features, you'll learn these new ASP.NET 2.0 features:
  • Master pages
  • Theming
  • Personalization & Web parts
  • Membership & Profile modules
  • Personalization
  • The new server-side UI controls such as GridView, DetailsView, FormView, Wizard, MultiView, the new xxxDataSource and navigation controls, among others.
  • The new compilation mode and deployment modes
  • The new framework for instrumenting the site, as well as handling & logging exceptions
  • The new ADO.NET 2.0 features (e.g. caching with database dependency)
  • The new classes for easy distributed transactions Management

This book is also available as part of the 5-book ASP.NET 2.0 Wrox Box (ISBN: 0-470-11757-5). This 5-book set includes:
  • Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition (ISBN: 0-470-04178-1)
  • ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution (ISBN: 0764584642 )
  • Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management (ISBN: 0764596985)
  • Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Server Control and Component Development (ISBN: 0471793507)
  • ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks and Tips (ISBN: 0764597663)
  • CD-ROM with more than 1000 pages of bonus chapters from 15 other .NET 2.0 and SQL Server(TM) 2005 Wrox books
  • DVD with 180-day trial version of Microsoft(r) Visual Studio(r) 2005 Professional Edition

User Review:

I am very impressed with this book, and have worked with a number of customers who have also found it extremely useful.

Marco's book differs from other programming books in that it doesn't attempt to provide an exhaustive reference of ASP.NET 2.0 features. Instead, he focuses the book around building a real-world end to end application and introduces and demonstrates how to use the key ASP.NET 2.0 concepts and features in the context of the application.

The result is a very readable book that provides a great deal of context about how ASP.NET 2.0 works, and how the different features integrate together. The result provides a reader with a much better grasp of the end to end structure of how applications are built, and can serve as a good roadmap to make progress in your knowledge and learning of ASP.NET.

I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who understands the basics of how ASP.NET works already, and is looking for a good book to take them to the next level and really start to build applications with it.


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