Who This Book Is For

ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook is written for programmers who are already familiar with ASP.NET 1.x (1.0 or 1.1) and who have used a previous version of Visual Studio .NET (either 2002 or 2003) to build ASP.NET web applications. Our aim is to introduce you, through a series of hands-on labs, to the new features of ASP.NET 2.0 using the Visual Studio 2005 development environment.

In order to get the most out of this book you'll need a copy of Visual Studio 2005 that supports Visual Basic. You are encouraged to work your way through the labs, as they are purposefully small and to the point; however, the complete source code (along with an Errata) is available on O'Reilly's web page for this book, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/aspnetadn/.

ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook covers very little of the material that an experienced ASP.NET 1.x programmer already knows: our goal is to help you to build on your current knowledge, not to waste your time with old material.

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Tip: If you are not yet familiar with ASP.NET, you may prefer to read Programming ASP.NET by Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz, which teaches ASP.NET from the ground up.As the examples in this book are all written in Visual Basic 2005, C# programmers will have to do some conversion. However, the syntactical differences between the two languages are minor and make the conversion process trivial. For more information, see the C# and VB.NET Conversion Pocket Reference by Jose Mojica (O'Reilly).

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Similarly, this book does not try to be exhaustive in its treatment of how you go about building web applications with ASP.NET 2.0 and the Visual Studio 2005 development environment. Instead, I introduce you to what is new in ASP.NET 2.0, the development environment and the class libraries, and to equip you for further exploration of those areas that are likely to be of particular interest to you.