Foreword

I was drawn to Microsoft explicitly for the opportunity to work on ASP.NET. It had a different name at that point, but the promise was to build a language-neutral, compiled Web platform that was friendly enough for the novice, and powerful and performant enough for the world's largest Web sites. I was intrigued by that promise, and working on it has indeed been a fascinating and rewarding journey.

The Web platform is built on the new Microsoft developer platform: the .NET Framework and the Common Language Runtime. This platform offers a rich set of services and capabilities upon which the Web application model was built. This platform let us change many of the rules of the game. For example, it became possible to have performance approaching the realm of compiled native code without losing the benefits of the rapid development experience associated with scripting environments.

ASP.NET was designed with a grand goal: to be a comprehensive platform for developing and delivering dynamic content to the Web. Among the challenges that entails is building a system with appeal to many different backgrounds and competencies: the Web developer scripting applications with Active Server Pages or other systems, the Visual Basic forms developer, and the ISAPI developer. What evolved was a rich platform that can be approached gradually, leveraging one's existing skills to become productive quickly, and then acquiring new skills to take advantage of new features of the platform.

The team started by building on the considerable merits of Active Server Pages and then expanding from there, constantly asking how tasks could be made easier and expressed in fewer lines of code. Support for declarative design, aided by good tools, was a key design goal. While this was being done, there was a constant awareness that the system must be extensible and support the sorts of advanced usage that many real-world, highly scalable Web sites demand.

An oft-repeated mantra during the development of ASP.NET was "No black boxes!" This is a goal that the development team intends to continue working on for quite some time, and it involves a commitment to a factored architecture that can be extended or customized to suit the problem at hand, whatever that might be. As a result, the core ASP.NET primitives are modularized and have a rich extensibility model.

In the following pages, you'll learn about where the points of extensibility are and how to use them. Fritz has carefully chosen the key concepts and explained how to weave them into an application. The critical building blocks of real Web applications are all well represented: request processing, pages and controls, configuration, error handling, security, caching, data presentation, and state management.

To develop ASP.NET applications, one does not need to understand the whole of what is a vast and complex system. However, as one begins to build more complex applications with challenging requirements, a thorough grounding in the basics and a reliable guide to what lies beyond become truly indispensable .

And with that, I commend the following work to you. It succeeds admirably as a guide to ASP.NET. It leads the reader through a solid understanding of the ASP.NET architecture and the core tenets of building Web applications. It then moves into more advanced applications of the technology that are indispensable for solving many of the real-world problems that face Web applications today. I think that the reader will agree that this work is indeed an essential guide to getting the most from ASP.NET.

Erik  Olson
Program  Manager
Microsoft  Corporation
Redmond,  Washington