Customer Reviews

Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The book is not quite what I had expected it to be. Many here are saying that it is not a book for beginners, but I think that is not true. The book tends to lean a little more to the fact that the reader is not an experienced programmer and had not used .NET in the past. It has the typical Anatomy of an ASP.NET Page and deployment discussions.

I would not call the book a 'Core Reference' if your definition of a reference is a book to refer back to when you have a specific question on how something works. There is a lot of useful data here, but it is interrupted with trivial examples and in my mind basic knowledge. If you are an experienced .NET developer, a cursory read in the bookstore will be more than enough to get to know the new controls in ASP.NET 2.0. The MSDN will fill in the blanks. This is probably a good book to use as a study guide for the new certification exams, but not a book that I will be using a reference for the ASP.NET 2.0 controls.

Of particular interest are the SQLDataAdapter class and changes in the 2.0 viewstate. The Web Controls are glanced over, but if you know ASP.NET 1.x it doesn't matter. There is a large discusssion on the new Bindable Grid Controls, but they once again are very limited compared to what is available via 3rd party controls (Not an issue with the book, but the controls themselves).

Overall the book is decent. I don't think it is a must have for your programming library, but good to be pick up if you are generally new to .NET and want to work with the latest version.

I have been programming ASP.NET for 3 years and my knowledge was increased by Dino's book: Programming ASP.NET (ISBN 0-7356-1903-4). This new book, Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 has a lot of promise of learning what is going on "under the hood". While all this information is good/nice to know, it isn't what an experienced ASP.NET 1.1 developer needs to know day one toward learning what is new in ASP.NET 2.0. I would, rather, recommend Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 upgrader's guide (ISBN 1-890774-35-9) to get you up to speed very quickly to the new features in 2.0. It is like looking at the earth from 50 miles high whereas Dino's new book is at the 1 mile level. It is good, no, very good but when your making a living at laying code you don't have time to stop what you are doing and learn new versions (every year or two). That's why I recommend Murach's book for a first look into 2.0 and then Dino's book to fill-in the details.

By the way, excellent work Dino!

Learning to program is a hands-on activity. The best teaching texts are those that provide example programs which the student can reproduce, tinker with, and observe, to learn the concepts illustrated thereby.

Unfortunately this book does not take that pedagogical approach. The textual descriptions are high-level, supplemented by abstract and simplified diagrams, as well as tables that list in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail the various classes, their methods, properties, &c. One looks in vain however for a good program to illustrate how an actual ASP.Net website might work (I gave up looking after Part I).

The author advises that this book should not be the first to be read on the subject of ASP.Net 2.0. Accordingly, I read a more basic text on the subject, which, through well-constructed sample programs, gave me a firm grasp of the basics and whetted my appetite to learn more advanced techniques I could use to build practical websites. I hoped this book would supply those techniques, but I was disappointed.

This book might be of use to a developer who already knows the essentials of ASP.Net 2.0, and needs a desk reference for use in day-to-day programming tasks. As a learning tool, it is about as useful as trying to learn a foreign language by reading a dictionary.

In his book, "Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, Core Reference" (Microsoft Press, 2006), Dino Esposito follows a strategic approach that complements other books on the topic, such as "Professional ASP.NET 2.0" from Bill Evjen and four others (Wrox, 2006) and "Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition" from Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz (O'Reilly, 2006).

Although not a Microsoft employee, Esposito writes from "inside the base." He explores capabilities of ASP.NET 2.0 in topics that will be familiar to developers experienced with previous Microsoft environments. The early chapters contain some Microsoft "evangelism," although they are free of the usual "incredibly" and "great" and "powerful." They explain how ASP.NET 2.0 overcomes limitations of some previous Microsoft systems. You can also skip to the ends of chapters for short sections that Esposito calls "Just the Facts."

A Web-enabled programming infrastructure provides two major services: server object representation of HTML pages and state management. In his first three chapters Esposito outlines ASP.NET 2.0 strategy and mechanisms for object representation, removing nearly all the mystery left by Microsoft's documentation. He also describes how support for localization works, a notable feature of Microsoft environments for many years that is mostly neglected in other ASP.NET books. Although XML is heavily used in ASP.NET 2.0, Esposito provides in this book only a brief description. His older book, "Applied XML Programming for .NET" (Microsoft Press, 2003), provides a detailed description in the context of ASP.NET 1.0.

After explaining ASP.NET 2.0 object services, Esposito digs into controls and data management for more than 400 pages before returning to strategy in presenting state management. He does not try to sugar-coat the facts: the ASP.NET 2.0 approach to state management is scalable only for sessions and page views, not for caching or applications. Most of his Chapter 13 is then spent detailing session and page view state. The following chapter on caching can be mostly ignored unless one is writing for only a small, fixed user base. The concluding chapter on security provides a balanced view of options and shows how to extend the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 authentication techniques.

While Esposito is clear about the limitations of ASP.NET 2.0, he says little about the alternatives. In his book you will get no comparisons with the Java-oriented environments and no examples of controls or class libraries from companies other than Microsoft. That might be a consequence of publishing with Microsoft Press. However, it is not easy to find such perspectives in any book. Developers who want to improve ASP.NET 2.0 responsiveness should look up the Microsoft Atlas project started in late 2004 and being run by Scott Guthrie. Esposito does not mention it, and as of spring, 2006, there is no book dealing with it.

Opposing industry trends in computer books, Microsoft Press does not publish for its potential readers a table of contents. The lack of such information from Amazon is not the fault of Amazon.

I was wrestling to sort the ASP.NET GridView. It's supposed to be easy, and practically codeless to use, and it is--sometimes. When a GridView is to be populated with the same dataset every time the page loads. But I had a drop-down list where a condition had to be selected, and based on that, the grid then had to be populated. I made it to the point where I got the dropdown selecting, and the grid populating, but there were 2 problems: paging didn't work, and sorting didn't work. I decided to turn paging off, so sorting was my last remaining issue.

Umpteen useless web articles later, I resorted to the paper books stashed on my shelf at home. First stop was Murach's ASP.NET 2.0, which is alleged to be so good. But it held no love for me. Second stop was Dino Esposito's "Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0: Core Reference"--and finally, I got the help I needed.

I'm blogging about this because a good book deserves real credit. Many mysteries were unraveled by the Esposito book, including that I needed to explicitly re-populate the GridView when its "Sorting" event fired. Esposito's directions were extremely explicit: use the "Sorting" event's GridViewArgEvents ("e" parameter) to find out the sort key, and write a special stored procedure that uses the sort key to ORDER the data differently. These last bits of information were the treasure that finally allowed me to get sorting to work.

I'm posting a copy of the rather odd-looking stored procedure that I ended up using below for your edification. The "@order_by" parameter names the column on which to sort, and the odd way of constructing the query from strings allows brackets to fit around any strange or keyword column names:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[lsp_NRSA_find_counts_and_person_by_naded]
@naded_id int,
@order_by nvarchar(12)
AS

BEGIN

IF @order_by = ''
BEGIN
SET @order_by = 'slide'
END

EXEC ('SELECT * ' +
'FROM vw_NRSA_cemaats_by_count_and_person ' +
'WHERE naded = ' + @naded_id +
' ORDER BY [' + @order_by + ']')

END

I'm not sure what to say about this book other than "look elsewhere for knowledge". The author really wanted the reader to know how great the new ASP.NET 2.0 platform is but there weren't any details in his explanations. It's like reading a really long advertisement for ASP.NET 2.0 that never pays off. Dino seemed very infatuated with his understanding of the platform and it's capabilities but somehow failed to curtail his ego long enough to do any real technical writing. I've read terse and boring tech stuff and this is the complete opposite, just fluff. It's just one long promise with no follow through.

I'm sticking with O'Reilly publications.

I am really unhappy with this book. As stated in other reviews, there are no examples anywhere, just discussion of different topics. For example, there is a chapter on the various controls that are available to add to a page, but no example. Yet, I didn't see that what he said about the control was so earth shattering, that it could not be known elsewhere.

Dino does preface his book, that it is not for beginners. But then, he goes on to "introduce" VS 2005. He "introduces" many of the controls, and what they do. But then, no examples. Excuse me? In a book that **is** for beginners,a control is introduced, its behaviour is described, and then there is usually an example. You get everything Dino gives you, PLUS an example that you can see the control in action.

In my opinion, he talked alot and said a little. Fluff, pure and simple.

I would *not* recommend this book, for anyone.

Greetings, I'm a ASP.NET 1.X programmer; I used Fritz Onion "Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C#" as a reference. "Programming Microsoft ASP.NET Core Reference" exceeded my expectations; it does explain the main features of ASP.NET Framework, including the compilation model of aspx pages, the HTTP Pipeline, the ASP.NET implementation of the strategy pattern and etc. Explains also the implication of using Master Pages and content Pages in the compilation of a aspx content page.
I recommend this book to everyone that works with ASP.NET.

This book lives up to the "core reference" designation. Although I've been developing w/ ASP.NET 2.0 since Beta 2 (and worked with v1.x for 3 years prior), I learned new things from this book. It's a great foundation, even for those who are familiar w/ .NET - but I think it would be accessible even to a newbie. Definitely a book I'll keep hand during dev work.

I can't wait unitl the "Advanced Topics" counterpart is ready to ship!

Even though I haven't finished this book (not enough time in the year), it's a very well written book. Not too hard to read, but complete and covers a ton of information. Highly recommended.