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

by Marco Bellinaso (Author) "In Bologna (the city where I live in Italy) almost half the population consists of students, including many foreigners..." (more)
Key Phrases: obj ectdatasource, dui ante, horrible chemical taste, Visual Studio, News Header, The Beer House (more...)

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.

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

• 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
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #56,833 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 45 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

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.

33 of 37 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)

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.

16 of 17 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)

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.