There are plenty of good reasons for a company to migrate to the .NET Framework and to the Common Language Runtime (CLR). For example, new development tools make it much easier to write, test, and debug your code. There's an incredible wealth of functionality provided by the Framework Class Libraries (FCL) that goes far beyond what's been available in previous versions of Visual Basic. The CLR makes it much easier and less costly to deploy an application and its dependant DLLs. Furthermore, the CLR provides many new extra security layers to defend against attacks from malicious software such as viruses and worms. However, of all the good reasons companies have found to migrate to the .NET Framework, ASP.NET seems to be leading the pack. ASP.NET has established itself as one of the most mature and viable aspects of the .NET Framework. ASP.NET is a server-side application framework that provides a complete development platform for creating Web applications that target users such as customers, employees , and vendors . ASP.NET is powerful because it gives you the ability to reach users across the Internet running on a variety of different browsers and operating systems. Over the last five or six years , the software industry has witnessed hundreds of companies that have successfully built large-scale applications with the original ASP framework. However, many of these same companies are now finding that there are tremendous benefits to migrating to ASP.NET. These benefits include improvements in performance, developer productivity, and code maintainability. ASP.NET also introduces valuable new features for caching and state management that can further improve an application's performance and its ability to scale in a Web farm environment. While there are many different books available on the topic of ASP.NET, I strongly encourage you to read and thoroughly absorb the material in this book. Fritz Onion teaches you about ASP.NET by providing you with a thorough and detailed view of the underlying architecture. If you're like me, you want to know more than just how to use Visual Studio .NET to build simple Web applications. You really want to know why ASP.NET works the way it does. You want to be able to answer questions like these.
I encourage you to read Essential ASP.NET because this book will give you both practical advice and a solid theoretical understanding of how ASP.NET works. Once you have digested the material in this book, you will be able to make informed decisions about the most important design issues that face ASP.NET developers. This, in turn , will allow you to design and write Web applications that outperform and provide more features than any applications you have created in the past. Ted Pattison |