Product 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:

• 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

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4508 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 600 pages

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.

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).

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Customer Reviews

Excellent Book
Nice book for website design and development. Author has done an excellent job explaining how to use DAL and BLL. I would recommend this book to anyone doing the web development.

First Rate - but not for beginners
This is one of the best software books I have read. The explanations are clear. There is a complete example for every step. He doesnt skip steps. His explanations are not verbose. His language is straighforward - I have yet to find a place where he uses "leverage". The text is written in VB which is not my first choice but the listings are all on disk in both VB & C# so I just browse the C# examples in Visual Studio as I read.

This is NOT a beginners book. To benefit from this book, you must be proficient in VB or C#, OOP and events, know something about web pages, html, CSS etc and have a rudimentary understanding of databases. He does spend a fair amount of time explaining database interaction so this book would serve as a tutorial on SQL queries and connection strings. I expect too that experts in ASP classic would be bored by this book and find its pace too leisurely. I am a software developer with just a bit of experience in web technology and this book really hit the mark.

Neither is this a reference book - although he does go into a lot of detail, the material is organized and chosen for instruction.

Great examples in this book for real world applications
The web site that this book creates by the end is a great example of a content management system. I don't get to program often, so seeing an implemented version of a 3-tier web site is valuable. The example in this book goes a long way to show (not just tell) why 3-tier design can be so beneficial. Lots of other great examples too that you would have a tough time finding in on-line forums, such as caching and paging directly from the database. I liked the extra touch of the last chapter, which provides the minute details for publishing your site to web server. All the examples are in c# only, which is the language that I prefer anyway.