Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: VB Edition [Paperback]

Anne Boehm (Author), Joel Murach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2005

What's new and how to use it! That's the quickest description for what this book presents as it shows Visual Basic developers how to upgrade from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0. Unlike competing books, which present the what's new but not the how to, this book uses complete applications to show the reader exactly how to use all of the valuable new 2.0 features, including data access, master pages, site navigation, login controls, profiles, themes, web parts, and more. This book also presents the best techniques for converting 1.x applications to 2.0 and for deploying 2.0 applications.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

If you’re a Visual Basic developer who’s going to be upgrading to ASP.NET 2.0 from ASP.NET 1.0 or 1.1, this book can save you many of hours of research. It can do that because we’ve already done that research for you. Then, we put that information into this single book that will help you upgrade to ASP.NET 2.0 as quickly and easily as possible.

Unlike most competing books, this one doesn’t just tell you what the new features are and how great they are and then let you figure out how to use them on your own. Instead, our book also shows you exactly how to use all of the new features so you get the most from them. That’s why we say that the purpose of this book is to show you: "What’s new and how to use it."

Like all our books, this one has features that you won’t find in competing books. That’s why we believe you’ll learn faster and better with our book than with any other.

Here are just three of those features.
• To make sure that you learn the new ASP.NET 2.0 features as quickly and easily as possible, all of the features are presented in the context of complete applications. These applications include the web forms, the aspx code, and the Visual Basic code. As we see it, the best way to learn is to study applications like these, even though you won’t find them in most competing books.

• Unlike many ASP.NET books, this one shows you how to get the most from Visual Studio 2005 as you develop your applications. Because we’ve found that this IDE is one of the keys to development productivity, we’re still surprised that most books ignore or neglect it.

• If you page through this book, you’ll see that all of the information is presented in "paired pages," with the essential syntax, guidelines, and examples on the right page and the perspective and extra explanation on the left page. This not only helps you learn faster by reading less, but it is also the best reference format that you’ll find anywhere. That’s why this book works so well for both training and reference.

From the Inside Flap

What programmers said about our ASP.NET 1.x book

"This book enabled me to write custom websites for two customers, which is exactly what I wanted it to help me with. No previous book did such an excellent job of demonstrating how to handle web application security and database classes."
Charles Profitt; posted at Developerland.com

"The section on creating web controls is invaluable— everything explained and clearly demonstrated."
Robert Gelb

"I especially appreciated the workaround insights for common hang-ups, like dealing with back-button refreshes—problems that often plague inexperienced ASP.NET developers. These gems alone will be worth the price of the book for many first-time .NET web authors."
5-star review by Mike Riley at asp.netPRO

"Your VB.NET and ASP.NET books are quite simply the best I’ve found. I like them (the style, the examples, everything) so well that I’ve required both of them for the Fall semester."
Chris Albright, Instructor, Kelley School of Business, Indiana Univ.

"For a beginner, Murach’s book is simply a dream, and although I have written a couple of web applications now, I still use it as a quick reference. WORTH EVERY PENNY IN GOLD."
Posted at Amazon

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 526 pages
• Publisher: Mike Murach & Associates Inc; VB ed edition (September 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890774367
• ISBN-13: 978-1890774363
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,100,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Targeted instruction to get to ASP.Net 2.0, January 2, 2006

By 

Andrew Novick "SQL and .Net Specialist" (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: VB Edition (Paperback)

This book was intended for me. I'm an experienced developer of ASP.Net applications and I'm ready to move on to ASP.Net 2.0. The book assumes that you know ASP.Net programming and takes you through the new features step-by-step in an easy to absorb style. All of it is based on using Visual Studio 2005 for your development environment.

The style of this book and, I think, all the Murach books is to pair up facing pages. The left side has text that explains the subject. The right side has examples, pictures, and other learning aids. Often this is a reiteration of the left side in a different style. This worked well for me and made it pretty easy to consume the content in byte size chunks.

This book is based on VB.Net 2005. There's only a little material on the changes to VB.Net 2005 from the previous version. There's also a C# book available. Due to client requests I've been doing most of my recent work in VB.Net so I chose this version.

Overall, I found it a great resource for the task at hand: learning ASP.Net 2.0. I'd recommend it to experienced developers who are ready to upgrade.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not for Beginners, but Invaluable for the Experienced, October 25, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: VB Edition (Paperback)

Be sure to note the title. If you're looking for a book on how to do ASP.NET pages, you might want to consider some other title first. This book is about upgrading to the new ASP.NET 2.0 edition. It presumes that you have enough experience with ASP.NET that you want to learn what's new and different, not how to start from the beginning. You might also want to have some experience in using earlier versions of Visual Studio as this book concentrates on using Visual Studio 2005 as the development environment. Of course the basic use of ASP in any of its varieties is to connect to a database, and to do this you need some experience with programming in SQL, the language of databases (SQL is a very powerful language of its own.). Finally, this book is the Visual Basic edition, there's also a C# Edition from Murach if that is your programming language of choice.

Wow! that sounds like you need a lot of background to start reading this book. Yes, I think that's true. Microsoft's ASP has grown from a very simple way to connect HTML pages to a database (when Microsoft first bought the package) to quite a powerful system capable of not only database connectivity but the full power of complete programming languages.

But if you are already doing your web site in the earlier version of the software, this book will enable you to take advantage of the new features in 2.0 quicker and easier than any other book I've seen. Note however, that this is a pretty good sized book in its own right. There a lot that's new in 2.0, this book doesn't just list what's new it explains the new features, illustrates why you might want to use them, and show you how to program the new features.

Using this book is a lot easier than trying to pull this information from a manual on the software.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, March 14, 2006

By 

Stephen E. Kennedy "redant" (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: VB Edition (Paperback)

It is clear and simple and right to the point. Very Helpful. It gave me a good foundation in ASP.NET 2.0.