Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB [Paperback]

Bill Evjen (Author), Scott Hanselman (Author), Devin Rader (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 8, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0470502207 | ISBN-13: 978-0470502204 | Edition: 1

This book was written to introduce you to the features and capabilities that ASP.NET 4 offers, as well as to give you an explanation of the foundation that ASP.NET provides. We assume you have a general understanding of Web technologies, such as previous versions of ASP.NET, Active Server Pages 2.0/3.0, or JavaServer Pages. If you understand the basics of Web programming, you should not have much trouble following along with this book's content.

If you are brand new to ASP.NET, be sure to check out Beginning ASP.NET 4: In C# and VB by Imar Spaanjaars (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2010) to help you understand the basics.

In addition to working with Web technologies, we also assume that you understand basic programming constructs, such as variables, For Each loops, and object-oriented programming.

You may also be wondering whether this book is for the Visual Basic developer or the C# developer. We are happy to say that it is for both! When the code differs substantially, this book provides examples in both VB and C#.

This book explores the 4 release of ASP.NET. It covers each major new feature included in ASP.NET 4 in detail. The following list tells you something about the content of each chapter.

• Chapter 1, ″Application and Page Frameworks.″ The first chapter covers the frameworks of ASP.NET applications as well as the structure and frameworks provided for single ASP.NET pages. This chapter shows you how to build ASP.NET applications using IIS or the built-in Web server that comes with Visual Studio 2010. This chapter also shows you the folders and files that are part of ASP.NET. It discusses ways to compile code and shows you how to perform cross-page posting. This chapter ends by showing you easy ways to deal with your classes from within Visual Studio 2010.

• Chapters 2, 3, and 4. These three chapters are grouped together because they all deal with server controls. This batch of chapters starts by examining the idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development. In addition to looking at the server control framework, these chapters delve into the plethora of server controls that are at your disposal for ASP.NET development projects. Chapter 2, ″ASP.NET Server Controls and Client-Side Scripts,″ looks at the basics of working with server controls. Chapter 3, ″ASP.NET Web Server Controls,″ covers the controls that have been part of the ASP.NET technology since its initial release and the controls that have been added in each of the ASP.NET releases. Chapter 4, ″Validation Server Controls,″ describes a special group of server controls: those for validation.

• Chapter 5, ″Working with Master Pages.″ Master pages provide a means of creating templated pages that enable you to work with the entire application, as opposed to single pages. This chapter examines the creation of these templates and how to apply them to your content pages throughout an ASP.NET application.

• Chapter 6, ″Themes and Skins.″ The Cascading Style Sheet files you are allowed to use in ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 are simply not adequate in many regards, especially in the area of server controls. This chapter looks at how to deal with the styles that your applications require and shows you how to create a centrally managed look-and-feel for all the pages of your application by using themes and the skin files that are part of a theme.

• Chapter 7, ″Data Binding.″ One of the more important tasks of ASP.NET is presenting data, and this chapter looks at the underlying capabilities that enable you to work with the data programmatically before issuing the data to a control.

• Chapter 8, ″Data Management with ADO.NET.″ This chapter presents the ADO.NET data model provided by ASP.NET, which allows you to handle the retrieval, updating, and deleting of data quickly and logically.

• Chapter 9, ″Querying with LINQ.″ The.NET Framework 4 includes a nice access model language called LINQ. LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. This chapter introduces you to LINQ and how to effectively use this feature in your Web applications today.

• Chapter 10, ″Working with XML and LINQ to XML.″ The .NET Framework and ASP.NET 4 have many capabilities built into their frameworks that enable you to easily extract, create, manipulate, and store XML. This chapter takes a close look at the XML technologies built into ASP.NET and the underlying .NET Framework.

• Chapter 11, ″Introduction to the Provider Model.″ The provider model is built into ASP.NET to make the lives of developers so much easier and more productive than ever before. This chapter gives an overview of this provider model and how it is used throughout ASP.NET 4.

• Chapter 12, ″Extending the Provider Model.″ After an introduction of the provider model, this chapter looks at some of the ways to extend the provider model found in ASP.NET 4. This chapter also reviews a couple of sample extensions to the provider model.

• Chapter 13, ″Site Navigation.″ Most developers do not simply develop single pages—they build applications. One of the application capabilities provided by ASP.NET 4 is the site navigation system covered in this chapter.

• Chapter 14, ″Personalization.″ Developers are always looking for ways to store information pertinent to the end user. After it is stored, this personalization data has to be persisted for future visits or for grabbing other pages within the same application. The ASP.NET team developed a way to store this information—the ASP.NET personalization system. The great thing about this system is that you configure the entire behavior of the system from the web.config file.

• Chapter 15, ″Membership and Role Management.″ This chapter covers the membership and role management system developed to simplify adding authentication and authorization to your ASP.NET applications. This chapter focuses on using the web.config file for controlling how these systems are applied, as well as on the server controls that work with the underlying systems.

• Chapter 16, ″Portal Frameworks and Web Parts.″ This chapter explains Web Parts—a way of encapsulating pages into smaller and more manageable objects.

• Chapter 17, ″HTML and CSS Design with ASP.NET.″ Visual Studio 2010 places a lot of focus on building a CSS-based Web. This chapter takes a close look at how you can effectively work with HTML and CSS design for your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 18, ″ASP.NET AJAX.″ AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In Web application development, it signifies the capability to build applications that make use of the XMLHttpRequest object. Visual Studio 2010 contains the ability to build AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications from the default install of the IDE. This chapter takes a look at this way to build your applications.

• Chapter 19, ″ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.″ Along with the capabilities to build ASP.NET applications that make use of the AJAX technology, a series of controls is available to make the task rather simple. This chapter takes a good look at the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and how to use this toolkit with your applications today.

• Chapter 20, ″Security.″ This chapter discusses security beyond the membership and role management features provided by ASP.NET 4. This chapter provides an in-depth look at the authentication and authorization mechanics inherent in the ASP.NET technology, as well as HTTP access types and impersonations.

• Chapter 21, ″State Management.″ Because ASP.NET is a request-response–based technology, state management and the performance of requests and responses take on significant importance. This chapter introduces these two separate but important areas of ASP.NET development.

• Chapter 22, ″Caching.″ Because of the request-response nature of ASP.NET, caching (storing previous generated results, images, and pages) on the server becomes rather important to the performance of your ASP.NET applications. This chapter looks at some of the advanced caching capabilities provided by ASP.NET, including the SQL cache invalidation feature which is part of ASP.NET 4. This chapter also takes a look at object caching and object caching extensibility.

• Chapter 23, ″Debugging and Error Handling.″ This chapter tells you how to properly structure error handling within your applications. It also shows you how to use various debugging techniques to find errors that your applications might contain.

• Chapter 24, ″File I/O and Streams.″ This chapter takes a close look at working with various file types and streams that might come into your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 25, ″User and Server Controls.″ Not only can you use the plethora of server controls that come with ASP.NET, but you can also use the same framework these controls use and build your own. This chapter describes building your own server controls and how to use them within your applications.

• Chapter 26, ″Modules and Handlers.″ This chapter looks at two methods of manipulating the way ASP.NET processes HTTP requests: HttpModule and HttpHandler. Each method provides a unique level of access to the underlying processing of ASP.NET, and each can be a powerful tool for creating Web applications.

• Chapter 27, "ASP.NET MVC." ASP.NET MVC is the latest major addition to ASP.NET and has generated a lot of excitement from the development community. ASP.NET MVC supplies you with the means to create ASP.NET using the Model-View-Controller models that many developers expect. ASP.NET MVC provides developers with the testability, flexibility, an...

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Take your web development to the next level using ASP.NET 4

ASP.NET is about making you as productive as possible when building fast and secure web applications. Each release of ASP.NET gets better and removes a lot of the tedious code that you previously needed to put in place, making common ASP.NET tasks easier. With this book, an unparalleled team of authors walks you through the full breadth of ASP.NET and the new and exciting capabilities of ASP.NET 4. The authors also show you how to maximize the abundance of features that ASP.NET offers to make your development process smoother and more efficient.

Professional ASP.NET 4:

• Demonstrates ASP.NET built-in systems such as the membership and role management systems

• Covers everything you need to know about working with and manipulating data

• Discusses the plethora of server controls that are at your disposal

• Explores new ways to build ASP.NET, such as working with ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX

• Examines the full life cycle of ASP.NET, including debugging and error handling, HTTP modules, the provider model, and more

• Features both printed and downloadable C# and VB code examples

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Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

Bill Evjen is one of the most active proponents of .NET technologies. He is the founder of the International .NET Association (INETA), author or coauthor of more than two dozen books, and Global Head of Platform Architecture at Thomson Reuters, Lipper.

Scott Hanselman is a principal program manager lead working in the Server and Tools Online Division at Microsoft. He has a popular blog and weekly podcast at www.computerzen.com and speaks worldwide on ASP.NET.

Devin Rader works at Infragistics where he focuses on delivering great experiences to developers using their controls. He's also a former INETA board member.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1536 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (March 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470502207
• ISBN-13: 978-0470502204
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #47 in Books > Computers & Technology > Microsoft > Development > Visual Basic
  • #71 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > C#

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lots of Information, potential Information Overload, March 22, 2010

By 

Shawn Stratton (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB (Paperback)

When this book was delivered I was in shock at the 1400+ pages, I've been reading on the book since and am several chapters in but I feel I know the book enough to give a fairly decent overview of how it was written and how it will hold up.

This book takes a great in-depth look at every aspect of ASP.NET 4 and gives clear and clean examples in both VB and C# (the authors seem to favor VB however.) Therein comes a warning, if you're new to ASP.NET, C#, or programing in general I strongly suggest you take a different book, this one is more to expand your existing knowledge not to build you from scratch. This book primarily covers the api of ASP.NET and how to effectively use it, it also covers topics such as LINQ, it does not cover language semantics or System Architecture. However, it does make up for neglecting those two subjects in covering Visual Studio 2010 in-depth, including diagramming.

Overall some of the content is a bit dry, this is a professional level book after all, but should be easy enough to read through once you get into your own pace. Don't let the 1400+ pages fool you or dissuade you from picking up this book, the length is partially due to screen shots and also because all code in the book is duplicated between VB to C# also the appendices take up quite a large section, however also keep in mind this book has 36 chapters covering Server and Client Controls to Deployment.

Summary:
Pros- Complete, direct, covers multiple languages (VB and C#,) easy enough to read.
Cons- Paperback only, can be overwhelming if you just open the book, alot of duplication between C# and VB that not everyone may be interested in.

Sideline - If you are new to C#/VB and .NET I would recommend using a language primer and probably the Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB (Programmer to Programmer) book by Wrox (Note the ASP.NET 4 version is due out soon.) Afterwards attacking this book will most likely get you where you need to be to compete for jobs/contracts/etc in .NET space.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good desktop reference, May 12, 2010

By 

Colin Brown "Colin Brown Microsoft MVP" (Birmingham, Alabama, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB (Paperback)

This book, I feel, is aimed at a high level overview of Asp.Net 4.0 and will mainly be used as reference manual that you refer to whenever you are looking for quick information on a certain aspect of Asp.Net's programming.

The book is hefty weighing in at over 1450 pages and covers virtually every aspect of Asp.Net programming that you would care to mention, although not every single aspect as I'll explain later. It is generally very easy to read with a good flowing style of writing although you can certainly ascertain where the writers have added new sections and re-written parts of chapters and where they have simply updated the previous release of the book for an older Framework. This is one of my major criticisms of this book and it is very prevalent in the early chapters. Whilst having a brief overview of the history of Asp.Net is good and should indeed be included in books such as this, after that, mentions of classic Asp should not be relevant. How many people are honestly going to be converting a website or application from Classic Asp straight to Asp.Net 4? The authors stating what the difference is and even providing examples in the early chapters of the differences seem totally of place with a technology that is now in it's fourth major iteration (sixth iteration if you count all the releases of the .Net framework) and is 10 years old. All that you gather from this is that the authors simply done a global replace of "asp.net x.x" to "asp.net 4" in these chapters and that the chapters were actually written back in the Asp.Net 1 or Asp.Net 1.1 days when the technology was still relatively new. These early chapters really need to be re-written from scratch.

Now that my main criticism is out of the way, lets proceed to the rest of the book. With over 35 chapters the authors touch on virtually every aspect of Asp.Net programming from the basic .Net controls through to newer technologies such as LINQ, Ajax and the new Asp.Net MVC 2 framework. Although each chapter is not an exhaustive guide to each of these technologies or concepts (it would take a book standing around 6 feet tall or more and would be totally impractical to do this) it does give you enough of an overview to get stuck in actually start using them. It would have been nice to see more on the Asp.Net MVC 2 framework itself although with the integration of other chapters detailing WCF services, the entity framework etc. it suffices to get you started if that is what you are looking for.

The book does not (and could not) cover every single aspect of the Asp.Net Framework 4 however a fairly large omission in my view is that there is not a chapter on JQuery which Microsoft are now supporting and is standard in Asp.Net 4 projects.

If you are new to Asp.Net programming then this book is an excellent starting place to learn the technologies involved. If you are an experienced programmer then this book is still recommended as a desktop reference book giving you a quick insight into a particular aspect that you may be dealing with then looking elsewhere for more detailed information should that need arise.

On a side note, I noticed that Wrox has changed their customary writers pictures on the front cover and have instead moved them to the back cover with some new and varied images being used on the front. I actually like this approach although I am puzzled by the images. What does a football (soccer if you're American) team holding what looks like a miniature version of the FA cup have to do with Asp.Net programming?

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worthy addition to your tech library, October 12, 2010

By 

Gilbert M. Vanegas "Computer Programmer Analyst" (San Bernardino, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB (Paperback)

Book review - "Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB", by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, and Devin Rader. ISBN: 978-0-470-50220-4 - Published by WROX

Hello, this is my book review for "Pro ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB". Even though there are many new technologies available for programming (Silverlight 4 for example), many times I find myself resorting to the trusty old asp.net web programming environment. Why? For me, most of my clients still consider websites the mainstream way of reaching customers, building database aware websites with logon profiles, SSL protection, SQL database calls etc. are still main staples of today's computer programmer.
An example of this is a membership "portal" application I am building; I was briefly sidetracked into using a popular CMS application framework, until my hosting provider objected to the CPU usage of the database and shutdown my database. This is because the CMS system stores all of its content into SQL server databases. So, while I was able to quickly build a prototype of my application using the CMS, changing hosting providers at this stage of the game was a little more than I wanted to deal with at this time. The CMS framework was enticing because it had many features available for use, security infrastructure (users/roles/profiles), ability to edit the content on the website directly, ability to write custom modules and apply them to the website etc... However, you do pay for that infrastructure, mostly in performance and having to write code that conforms to the way the CMS is built. Don't get me wrong, I still like the concept and will probably re-explore the CMS approach (it's based upon asp.net by the way, but it has an additional framework built up on top of it) only in my project's case, I had to move on and get everything going.
So, I decided to make use of many of the features in asp.net such as membership provider, role provider and profile provider (read up on the aspnetdb command), WCF services hosted in IIS, and Silverlight content also hosted in an asp.net webpage. While I didn't have that initial CMS framework available for my consumption, I now have the advantage of knowing and controlling every little nuance in my programming because I am building my system with plain asp.net code (C# mostly) using much of the clever and productive ways that Microsoft has enhanced ASP.NET over the years. I have written many an asp.net website over the past 12 years or so (since asp.net 1.0 first came out).
Moral of the story? There is always a good and a bad about every choice we may make as a programmer. In the case of ASP.NET, there is not much to complain about, while I did have to build up more infrastructure than I would have if I stayed with the CMS, I was able to take advantage of the many improvements in asp.net 4.0 that make it easier and more productive to build up the infrastructure in the first place. As stated earlier, the CMS added a layer of code that had to (at times) be conformed to, for example, you had to write CMS modules in a certain way in order for the CMS framework to recognize them). My asp.net website outperforms the CMS based one by a large degree also, it is blazingly fast compared to the CMS.
Now, on to the book. I have read many of the latest asp.net 4 books that have recently been released to print. One fairly unique feature about this book is it has code samples in both C# and VB.NET. Lately, most books I have read focus on the C# programming language. I still believe that C# is the language I would start with if I was just starting out, but I also feel that programming languages are not meant to be memorized verbatim. It's much more important to get a solid understanding of how computer programming works and the various programming methodologies and concepts that are out there in the world. It's a common misconception to people starting out with computer programming that it's something that you memorize and once you memorize the syntax, you stay with that language. Not at all, programming is the art and science of telling a computer what you want it to do, a programmer should be able to pick up any language and within a few hours or days be able to build useful applications or games etc. with it. This is what makes programming exciting, you are telling your humble servant (the computer) to do whatever you want it to do!
The book has good content on pretty much any concept about asp.net that you could ask for. While there are few real changes in asp.net 4.0,it does seem to perform faster (as opposed to earlier versions), the book does a thorough job of covering asp.net as a whole entity, I find it to be very thorough and it covers most any topic you can think of related to ASP.NET programming. While it does not cover too much the usage of Visual Studio 2010 (the preferred development IDE for .net framework 4.0), it does have a useful Appendix "B", which outlines some tools that can be used in conjunction with Visual Studio, I found this chapter to be pretty unique and useful, because it has tools I never heard of that I will be sure to play around with and add to my arsenal.
Topics I found to be especially useful include Chapter 16, Portal Frameworks and Web Parts (since I am involved in writing a CMS system) and Chapter 31, WCF (windows communication foundation), without WCF you aren't able to easily integrate Silverlight applications into your application domain. This book seems to deal with Silverlight 3, which is pretty surprising because Silverlight 4 was released in conjunction pretty much with .net framework 4.0.
One chapter in particular (Appendix D) covered "dynamic language runtime" which I don't recall having read much about in other books or websites, it was very interesting this chapter, I recommend reading up on it.
I recommend studying up on Master Pages, LINQ, Security, Entity Framework, Working with Services and the provider models (Membership/Profile/Roles) because they are typically areas of asp.net where you get a lot of useful infrastructure critical to any halfway complex asp.net website.
I downloaded the code samples and found them to be useful and able to showcase the relevant topics effectively.
How does this book stack up to other asp.net books I have read? I believe it fits in very well, you can't go wrong with this book, the content is not really geared to the beginner, I would consider it intermediate to advanced definitely.
A minor criticism of this book is its typeface, it is smaller than many other books I have read, but it's probably because of the sheer volume of content (about 1500) pages of jam-packed useful content all about the topic of ASP.NET.

Conclusion: This has a lot of useful content, the authors spent a considerable amount of effort on this book and it ranks near the top of the asp.net programming technical books I have read. I would definitely recommend this book to those who are thinking about purchasing it.