How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1, ASP.NET 2.0 , is an introduction to ASP.NET and the .NET platform. There are also notes in this first chapter on the major improvements made in ASP.NET 2.0 over ASP.NET 1.x.

Chapter 2, Visual Studio 2005 , explores the Visual Studio 2005 Integrated Development Environment and shows how you can use it most efficiently to create ASP.NET applications.

The next three chapters (Chapter 3, Controls: Fundamental Concepts, Chapter 4, Basic Controls, and Chapter 5, Advanced Controls ) provide complete coverage of ASP.NET Server Controls.

Chapter 6, Web Site Fundamentals , goes beyond the controls to show you how to use code-behind effectively, and how to manage state in the otherwise stateless Web and describes the lifecycle of a Web page in detail and, finally shows you how to take advantage of advanced directives .

Chapter 7 examines Tracing, Debugging, and Error Handling in ASP.NET.

Chapter 8 looks at Validation . ASP.NET provides extensive support for data validation, including ensuring that a choice has been made, checking that values are within a range, and matching regular expressions. The ASP.NET Framework will automatically and invisibly take advantage of the capabilities of up-level browsers (such as IE6) to do the data validation at the client, while still providing server-based validation for down-level browsers and to protect against spoofing.

Chapter 9 looks at Web Data Access , and explores the new controls in ASP.NET 2.0 that make interacting with data sources such as databases and XML files far easier than ever before. With these new controls you can reduce the amount of code you write by over 75 percent.

Chapter 10, ADO.NET , shows you the technology underlying the controls described in Chapter 9, so you understand fully how it all works and so you can take precise control when necessary.

Chapter 11, Forms-Based Security , describes in detail how to implement forms-based security to constrain user access to your web site over the Internet. New controls in ASP.NET 2.0 integrate with SQLExpress, SQL Server, or your own data store to create users and roles (groups) and to facilitate authentication and authorization.

Chapter 12, Master Pages and Navigation , describes features that help you build professional-quality Web Applications. Master Pages allow you to create a uniform look and feel throughout your application, and the Navigation controls allow you to build site maps, menus , and breadcrumbs quickly and easily to facilitate navigation of large applications.

Chapter 13, Personalization , shows you how to allow your users to tailor the look and feel of your site to their own requirements and how to store that information so when the user returns, the site remembers the user's preferences and state. New ASP.NET controls and technology make this surprisingly easy and facilitate the creation of advanced professional web sites.

Chapter 14, Custom and User Controls , covers the powerful, yet easy to use, technology that allows you to extend ASP.NET to create controls customized for your specific problem domain.

Chapter 15, Creating Web Services, shows you how to create web services that allow other applications to interact with your application programmatically, and Chapter 16, Consuming Web Services , shows you how to create client applications that present data retrieved from Web Services.

Chapter 17 looks at Caching and Performance , focusing on issues related to building fast, scalable applications.

Chapter 18 covers Application Logic and Configuration ,and Chapter 19 focuses on Deployment . The .NET platform simplifies building ASP.NET applications, with text file configuration and XCOPY deployment, but often you want to go beyond the fundamentals to create self-deploying applications that can be used on web farms and that facilitate easy installation.

Appendix A provides the Visual Studio 2005 keyboard shortcuts, while Appendix B provides a crash course in Relational Database Technology .