Introduction

One of the roles of the author of an advanced book is to make a reasonable guess about the things readers do know and to patch in the gaps where readers might be struggling. I have been fortunate enough to have spent a couple of years now working on .NET projects, so I can borrow from that experience in making my guesses.

In this chapter I try to avoid the glaringly obvious and instead talk about things that presented problems to me or to others whom I have worked with or heard from. As a result this chapter presents a strategy for building ASP.NET Web pages in such a way as to be able to create them simply, consistently, and reliably.

I spent the last couple of years working on a system comprised of five applications. Half of the team members were seasoned programmers and Web application developers. The other half were mainframe developers. The techniques I use in this chapter come from three sources: solutions to the problems the mainframers had learning ASP.NET, solutions to the problems the experienced developers had making the adjustment, and best practices proposed by Microsoft's IBuySpy portal.