Chapter 25. ADVANCED ASP.NET

IN BRIEF

This chapter is designed to provide you with valuable techniques and solutions to real-world problems faced by people creating production ASP.NET applications.

When building enterprise-scale ASP.NET websites, you very rarely find that a showstopper problem involves a programmer not knowing how a specific method of a control works or how to display something a certain way. More frequently the problems occur in trying to build applications that work in web farms, or applications that take into account user location, language, and culture.

This chapter will show you how to build ASP.NET applications that work properly within a web farm context, as well as how to build applications that take into account geographic location, user language, and cultural identity. Wrapping up this chapter will be a discussion of two advanced techniques for enhancing and empowering ASP.NET applications: HttpModules and HttpHandlers.

WHAT YOU NEED

REQUIRED SOFTWARE	.NET Framework SDK v1.1 Visual Studio .NET 2003 with C# installed IIS 5.0 or greater Windows XP Pro, Windows 2000, or Windows Server 2003
RECOMMENDED HARDWARE SKILLS REQUIRED	PC that meets .NET SDK minimum requirements C# and .NET familiarity Familiarity with ASP.NET and IIS

ADVANCED ASP.NET AT A GLANCE

Creating ASP.NET Applications in a Web Farm		499
	ViewState in a Web Farm	499	Web Farm Configuration and Deployment	504
	Session State Maintenance in a Web Farm	501	Web Farm Best Practices, Recommendations, and Caveats	505
	Application State in a Web Farm	503
Localization and Globalization in ASP.NET		506
	Using Localized Resources	506	"Out of the Box" Localization Functionality	511
	Displaying Localized Content	507
Creating Custom HttpModules		513
	Understanding the ASP.NET Application Events	513	Creating a Custom HttpModule	513
Creating Custom HttpHandlers		516
	Building a Synchronous HttpHandler	516
Summary		518
Further Reading		519