Introduction

Web development has been rapidly evolving over the years. The features and functionality that today’s web developers are asked to produce are exponentially more involved and complex than they were just a few years ago. As the demands of today’s business and commercial software grow, so too must the power of the tools and development frameworks developers use every day.

Even in the years since ASP.NET was first introduced, it has undergone dramatic growth in terms of ease of use, power, flexibility, scalability, and time to market. Some of the largest websites hosted on the Internet have ASP.NET and the .NET Framework to thank for their speed, power, and scalability including Dell, MySpace, and Microsoft.

Whether you plan on building the next greatest social network, a simple blogging site, or a year-long project to build a suite of Line of Business applications for the enterprise—ASP.NET might be the right tool for the job.

Who Should Read This Book?

ASP.NET 4 Unleashed is for professional programmers who need to create rich, interactive websites. This book is a comprehensive reference for building websites with all the tools and technology that are part of the ever-growing ASP.NET umbrella. There are hundreds of code samples on the accomanying website that you can use to immediately begin building your website.

If you are new to building websites with ASP.NET, you can use this book to learn everything you need to know to build a website with the ASP.NET Framework. If you are an experienced ASP.NET developer, you can use this book to refresh your memory on some lesser-used features and learn about the new features in ASP.NET 4.

What Do You Need to Know Before You Read This Book?

To get the most out of this book, you should have a decent familiarity with the core concepts of the .NET Framework. This book can be used as a reference for ASP.NET veterans as well as serve as a full, cover-to-cover learning experience for developers new to building ASP.NET web applications. The samples are designed to be clear and easy to read, regardless of whether your background is in VB.NET or C#.

To get the most from the database chapters, you should have some experience working with a database, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or Microsoft Access. Purely to make the samples easier to install and test, the data-driven samples either work from data files or from SQL Server databases.

If you want to run every sample from this book, you should be running at least Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or Windows 7 for best results. You should also have the latest version of Internet Information Server (IIS) installed and some version of Visual Studio 2010 installed.

Changes to This Book

This edition of the book reflects many important transitions in the ASP.NET Framework. There are several new chapters in this book that cover features introduced in ASP.NET 4, such as a new charting control, a new URL routing engine, use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and WCF Data Services and much more.

Another area that has seen large amounts of change and improvement in ASP.NET 4 is the use of client-side scripting such as Ajax. The entire Ajax section of this book has been completely redone since the previous version.

How This Book Is Organized

Although we encourage you to read this book from start to finish, reading chapter by chapter, some experienced ASP.NET developers might want to pick and choose chapters and skip the ones that are review. If necessary, you can use this book solely as a reference and jump to a chapter only when the need arises. It might be helpful, therefore, to have an idea of the overall organization of this book.

• Part I: Building ASP.NET Pages—Provides you with an overview of the basic controls included in the ASP.NET Framework. You learn how to build interactive Web Forms with the form controls. You also learn how to validate form data with the validation controls. Finally, you learn how to upload files and display interactive calendars and wizards with the rich controls.

• Part II: Designing ASP.NET Websites—Discusses how you can create a common layout and style for the pages on your website. You learn how to use Master Pages to share content across multiple pages. You also learn how to use Themes to create a consistent page style.

• Part III: Performing Data Access—Focuses on data access. You learn how to use the ListView and GridView controls to display, page, sort, and edit a set of database records. You learn how to use the DetailsView and FormView controls to display and edit a single database record at a time. WCF Data Services are introduced in this section.

• Part IV: Building Components—Focuses on building custom components. You learn how to design and create multitiered applications. You also learn how to build data access components by taking advantage of both LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET.

• Part V: Site Navigation—Discusses the various navigation controls included in the ASP.NET Framework, such as the TreeView and Menu controls. You learn how to use these controls with a Site Map to allow users to easily navigate a website. You also learn how to use the VirtualPathProvider class to abstract a website from the file system.

• Part VI: Security—Focuses on the Login controls and Membership API. You learn how to create a user registration and authentication system. You learn how to store Membership information in either a SQL Server database or Active Directory.

• Part VII: Building ASP.NET Applications—Discusses a variety of topics related to building ASP.NET applications. For example, you learn how to improve the performance of your ASP.NET applications by taking advantage of caching. You also learn how to localize your ASP.NET applications so that they can be easily translated and presented in multiple human languages.

• Part VIII: Custom Control Building—Concentrates on extending the ASP.NET Framework with custom controls. For example, you learn how to create custom data access controls that work like the ListView and GridView controls.

• Part IX: ASP.NET AJAX—Concentrates on extending the ASP.NET Framework with custom controls. For example, you learn how to create custom data access controls that work like the ListView and GridView controls.