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

Marco Bellinaso (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0764584642 | ISBN-13: 978-0764584640 | Publication Date: May 8, 2006 | Edition: 1

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

Editorial Reviews

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (May 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764584642
• ISBN-13: 978-0764584640
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #453,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More 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 in designing and implementing large websites 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 an author or co-author for 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 was a co-author for a number of other Wrox Press books, among which are 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 website for .NET developers which was born from the even more famous www.vb2themax.com site for VB6. Besides writing he also does quite 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.dotnet2themax.com/blogs/mbellinaso).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent ASP.NET 2.0 Book, December 7, 2006

By 

Scott Guthrie (Redmond, WA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

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.

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, Great Learning Tool, June 15, 2006

By 

Thomas McNamee (Tucson, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

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.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great "how-to" book on ASP.NET, August 29, 2006

By 

Frank Stepanski (PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

After you are familiar with the basics of ASP.NET and have created some simple web applications, I always find myself wondering where to go next. Looking at advanced "Pro" books leaves me wondering if I'll ever use those advanced topics. All I am looking for is a continuation of the beginner book with some "real-world" examples with some intermediate topics or other useful techniques for what I already have learned.

This book fits the bill perfectly. The author briefly reviews some basic concepts of ASP.NET and its framework and then goes into the web site project that will be built upon throughout the whole book. It goes in depth in topics such as server-side controls, data controls (GridView, DataList, SQLDataSource), navigation controls, exception handling etc. As the author goes through each topic it uses the project website as a guide on how to implement it.

It really helped me understand how to put everything together into one mid-sized website as opposed to little bits and pieces like in other books. A great book for anybody needing an intermediate book on ASP.NET.