How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1, is an introduction to ASP.NET and the .NET platform and also demonstrates the simplest possible application you might build with ASP.NET. Chapter 2, introduces the Visual Studio .NET Integrated Development Environment and shows how you can use it to create ASP.NET applications.

The next three chapters (Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5) provide complete coverage of HTML Server Controls and ASP Controls. (Note that Chapter 10, Chapter 13, and Chapter 14 round out the extensive discussion of controls in ASP.NET.)

Chapter 6 covers several fundamental concepts crucial to building powerful web applications, including code segregation, state management, and the control life cycle.

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 range checking, 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 (e.g., IE6) to do the data validation at the client, while still providing server-based validation for down-level browsers.

Chapter 9 looks at Data Binding, the powerful ability to bind complex user interface controls to database tables and other data structures.

Chapter 10 examines the List-Bound Controls, Part I, including the incredibly powerful data grid. This chapter also looks at the event-driven nature of ASP.NET controls.

Chapter 11 focuses on Accessing Data with ADO.NET and the new technology for interacting with back-end databases. ADO.NET is built on a disconnected data set that provides a subset of the database, complete with multiple tables and full encapsulation of the relationships among the tables. ADO.NET is, essentially, an object-oriented model of your data.

Chapter 12 looks at the support provided in ADO.NET for updating your data and ensuring data integrity in the presence of concurrency issues. This chapter also explains a variety of techniques for supporting transactions

Chapter 13 explores advanced techniques integrating these powerful tools with the ADO.NET technology.

Chapter 14 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 is a Web Services Overview. Web services are essentially web applications without a user interface. Web services allow you to provide services, potentially for a fee, to other web sites or applications. Chapter 16 and Chapter 17 complete the comprehensive discussion of this subject.

Chapter 18 looks at Caching and Performance, focusing on issues related to building fast, scalable applications.

Chapter 19 examines Security and the tremendous support provided by the .NET Framework for building secure applications.

Chapter 20 covers Controlling, Configuring, and Deploying Applications. The .NET platform greatly simplifies building ASP.NET applications, with text file configuration and XCOPY deployment.

Appendix A provides a crash course in Relational Database Technology, and Appendix B is a reference to Bug Database Architecture.