Introduction

ASP.NET is Microsoft's flagship technology for building highly interactive, highly scalable websites. Some of the largest websites hosted on the Internet were built with the ASP.NET Framework, including the Dell website (www.Dell.com), parts of the Martha Stewart website (www.MarthaStewart.com), parts of the eBay website (www.eBay.com), the XBOX website (www.xbox.com), the MySpace website (www.MySpace.com), and the Microsoft website itself (www.Microsoft.com). If you need to build a highly interactive website that can scale to handle thousands of simultaneous users, then ASP.NET is the technology to use.

The ASP.NET 2.0 Framework is the latest version of the Microsoft ASP.NET Framework. The ASP.NET 2.0 Framework introduces more than 50 new controls. However, simply counting the number of new controls does not provide you with an accurate picture of the extent of the new features included in the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. Many of the most important changes are framework-level changes.

Following are just a few of the significant new features of ASP.NET 2.0:

• A new declarative data access model By taking advantage of the new data access controls, you can display and edit a set of database records without writing a single line of code.

• Master Pages and Themes By taking advantage of Master Pages and Themes, you can easily create a common style and layout for all the pages in your website.

• Membership API By taking advantage of the Membership API, you can build an entire user registration system that stores user information in a Microsoft SQL Server database table or Active Directory without writing any code.

• Web Parts By taking advantage of Web Parts, you can build portal applications that can be customized by users or administrators at runtime.

• SQL Cache Invalidation By taking advantage of SQL Cache Invalidation, you can cache database records in memory and reload the records automatically when the data in the underlying database changes.

• AJAX By taking advantage of AJAX, you can update a web page without posting the page back to the web server.