Customer Reviews

Mastering Web Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I purchased this book because I suddenly discovered that the personal ecommerce website that I had hoped to do in Macromedia Studio 8 couldn't be done because Macromedia Studio 8 doesn't support ASP.NET 2.0 - and ASP.NET 2.0 has some amazing new functionality that I won't give up to use Macromedia. So I decided I needed to use Visual Studio 2005. I played with Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition for a couple of weeks until Visual Studio 2005 Professional finally arrived. I was very impressed with VWD 2005 Express Edition but it lacks some features that you need for a full function commercial site. I am writing this review before I have gone into this book in sufficient detail to be able to answer my own questions because I feel that other potential buyers should be aware of the issues that I feel need to be resolved.

I saw this book and bought it here on Amazon because it seemed that it might have some valuable content on Visual Studio 2005 - and there is very little information available about VS 2005 at this moment except the Microsoft literature. Now I am confused about the book because I really can't determine what product the author was using when he wrote the book. The book is about a product called Microsoft Visual Web Developer - not about either Visual Studio 2005 Professional or Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition. It appears that there is valuable content here and although the product he was using was probably pretty close to Visual Studio 2005 Professional the author definitely writes about functionality that I cannot yet find in Visual Studio 2005 Professional. My issue is that I really would like to know up front what functionality that the book covers is not included in VS 2005. Of course it's possible that I will find a hidden configuration option in VS 2005 that will suddenly turn it into Visual Web Developer but in one place in the book the author says that he is writing a book on Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition - but I can't find reference to it anywhere. My guess is that he was writing on an early beta of VS 2005 but that a number of changes have occurred between when he wrote and what is being shipped. I am an optimistic and will give the book 4 stars now because of what appears to be valuable content, but that rating could go up to 5 stars or down to 2 stars depending on how close the material is to what I need to understand Visual Studio 2005 Professional. Also I was bothered by the fact that within 15 minutes after opening the book the binding began to fall apart.

I have contacted the author to try and answer this question but as of the writing of this review have not gotten back a response.

Microsoft continues to refine its Active Server Pages. Now, under .NET, we have ASP.NET 2.0. Designed to handle large scale commercial websites. In tandem with this, Mueller demonstrates how Microsoft offers Visual Studio in its 2005 version, as the preferred front end to ASP.NET.

The book is perhaps best read as a complementary exposition of Visual Studio and ASP. Hence, it goes into the important ideas of a master page and themes, which are new features of ASP 2. Since you are inherently dealing with dynamic HTML pages, then a master page is a very logical factoring out of a common look for a set of pages. Mueller points out that the emphasis is on your bottom line. Use of these can save you development time. As well as producing more robust code, because by centralising, there is less chance of error when manually maintaining many pages.

The chapter on client side scripting can be useful. Though unlike master pages or themes, the scripting is mostly unchanged from earlier versions of ASP, since it pertains to JavaScript.

If you are planning a large website, chances are you will need a back end database. In the context of this book, the preferred choice is supplied by Microsoft - SQL Server. So Mueller furnishes a good tutorial on using Visual Studio to connect your ASP pages to an instance of SQL Server.

Also, with the continued danger of attacks, the book shows how to sterilise data that a user would type into one of your pages. Vital in stopping SQL injections or any attempt to access the operating system. Here, the use of Validators in ASP is a great help, in reducing what you have to write. The only quibble is that Mueller could have used the term SQL injection, as that is the common description of many of these attacks.

The heft of the book reflects Mueller's coverage of these and other topics. All of which are nowadays necessary to developing a website.

I downloaded the eBook and within a couple of minutes realised that it only had one Chapter specifically abour VS 2005. As the first para in Chapter 1 point out:
"When you installed Visual Studio .NET 2005, you might have been surprised to find a bonus-Visual
Web Developer. This new product fills a gap in the Visual Studio product line and is Microsoft's recognition
that Web development has become a major part of the application market." So the book is about Visual Web Developer and should have been entitled as such.
There is a chapter later in the book about migrating your VS 2003 projects and the final chapter ( Chapter 25! ) has the following "This chapter addresses the code movement process from a little project to big project perspective.
It assumes that you've experimented with Visual Web Developer Express and now need the full capabilities
that Visual Studio can provide." Too little too late... Unless you want to find out about Visual Web Developer, buy something else.

The chapter titles sound very interesting but the contents do not provide enough practical information.

I was very satisfied at the scope and ease of understanding of this book

I also wonder why the author has named the book "Web Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005" although it just covers the Visual Web Developer, and just a very shor part is about VS 2005. I wanted to know how to put the application on the production server, especially how to transfer the database through VS to the server, but it's not possible to find even a small hint there. I am disappointed and sorry about wasting my time and mony for this book and find the author irresponsible for the wrong entitling his book and spoofing the people.

Regards

I tried using this book to find out a specific item of information and it contained no examples on something that is a basic part of building web pages. Finally found the answer (and even with a good explanation!) in a dummies book. This book is only good to feed a fire!