Summary

Although this is a somewhat contrived scenario, this chapter has demonstrated just how powerful ASP.NET 2.0 is, and how it can considerably reduce development time while helping you to construct efficient and attractive Web sites and Web applications. One of the main goals of ASP.NET 2.0 is to reduce even further the amount of code you have to write to build dynamic and interactive pages, removing, in particular, the need for that repetitive code you seem to need for almost all of your projects! As you can see from this chapter, you can achieve remarkable results without writing any code at all.

In this chapter, you have seen how you can create and then evolve a data access page, starting with dragging a database table onto the editing window. You then saw how easy it is to change the content and appearance of the grid and then add features like sorting, paging, and editing. The next stage added a category selection capability, so that only specific sets of rows appear. Following this was implementation of a "form"-style view of the data.

Once the page provided the features required, you next saw how you can make it part of an existing site, by matching the overall style and layout using a Master Page and by integrating it with a menu and navigation system. All this was achieved within the visual design tool, using drag and drop techniques and Wizards, and without writing any code at all.

In the next chapter, you will work more deeply with the data source controls and data display controls introduced here, seeing how they offer a wide range of features to support all kinds of data management requirements.