Summary

The e-commerce application illustrates many of the new features of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. First, it illustrates how you can take advantage of Master Pages and Themes when designing your website. The e-commerce application takes advantage of both technologies to make it easy for you to change the appearance of the website.

The e-commerce application also takes advantage of the new Navigation controls and Site Map infrastructure included in the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. The application uses TReeView, Menu, and SiteMapPath controls. These controls are bound to Site Map data retrieved from either the standard XmlSiteMapProvider or the custom CategorySiteMapProvider.

The e-commerce application also takes advantage of the new performance-enhancing features of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. The application uses Polling SQL Cache Dependencies to cache product and category data in memory just as long as the data does not change in the database.

Finally, the e-commerce application conforms to W3C standards such as XHTML and accessibility standards. The entire website validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.