Summary

Building enterprise Web applications with the help of the .NET Framework yields benefits not seen before in traditional ASP, including rapid development, more powerful dynamic data rendering, and greater deployment flexibility. At the center of these benefits are agreed-upon standards, service abstraction, and data binding.

Standards that define how each Web form looks reduce errors and ensure consistency throughout the entire Web application. These standards can be published as HTML templates, which can then be copied and pasted into new Web forms as starting points. Other standards are more or less guidelines that specify whether client scripting is permitted and what amount or type of data can be stored in the session. Services abstraction, with the help of the Business Facade project, allows changes to the underlying data access to not interfere with the application code. Finally, data binding makes the creation of data-enabled Web forms even faster by setting control properties that point to collections. All of these elements come together to build fast, reliable Web applications in a timely manner.

The next chapter implements an enterprise presentation layer as a desktop application. Desktop applications have different strengths and weaknesses when compared to Web applications. One thing both have in common, however, is the need for a structured development framework that minimizes errors and encourages reuse. The next chapter presents a framework for rapid application development that incorporates forms inheritance, user controls, application configuration files, and dynamic access to assemblies.