Overview
A well-known expert in the ASP development community, best-selling Author Stephen Walther brings his experience as an ASP.NET trainer to ASP.NET Unleashed. With this valuable guide, readers learn the advanced features of ASP.NET, and how to apply them in their own Internet applications. This in-depth, code-intensive title covers a broad range of advanced ASP.NET topics that include:
- Validating Form Data;
- Programming Mobile Devices;
- Using Code Behind;
- Building Custom ASP.NET Controls;
- Creating Graphics with GDI.NET;
- Data Access with ADO.NET;
- ASP.NET Security;
- Using XML in ASP.NET Applications;
- Building and Consuming Web Services.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewASP.NET Unleashed, Second Edition is really big, really thorough, and really good. The explanations are simple and clear as anything we’ve seen in a .NET book. The sample code addresses virtually every facet of ASP.NET development, from little gems (code for validating credit cards) to full-fledged web stores. Best of all, Stephen Walther identifies the mistakes ASP.NET developers are most likely to make -- and presents detailed solutions.
Few authors or developers bring as much ASP and ASP.NET experience to the table. Walther was lead developer for the Microsoft ASP.NET Community Starter Kit, a web site produced by Microsoft to illustrate best practices for building ASP.NET applications. He’s been working with ASP.NET since its earliest alphas, and taught the world’s first class on ASP.NET programming -- as well as workshops at organizations ranging from NASA to Verizon. Before ASP.NET was introduced, he was one of the world’s leading ASP developers. One of his sites was used by 200 colleges -- including MIT, Harvard, and Stanford -- to accept online applications.
You could hire Walther to teach you personally (the going rate is $7,000 for a four-day session). Short of that, ASP.NET Unleashed, Second Edition is the next best thing.
This book addresses an extraordinarily wide range of ASP.NET development issues. You’ll learn how Code-Behind really works, and how to use it to thoroughly separate presentation from content. How to dramatically improve the performance of ASP applications by caching entire pages, page fragments, and DataSets. How to make the most of controls on your ASP.NET pages, including rich controls such as Calendar and AdRotator.
Mobile ASP.NET development is becoming increasingly important, and with .NET Framework 1.1, ASP.NET’s powerful mobile controls have been integrated into the core .NET Framework. Walther’s thorough introduction will help you use these mobile controls to build wireless applications that generate whatever markup and rendering you need, almost regardless of your target device: web-enabled cellphone, PDA, or pager.
In a full section on security, Walther shows how to use SSL in ASP.NET pages, leverage .NET’s encryption classes, and utilize all three ASP.NET authentication approaches: forms-based, Windows-based, and Passport-based (à la Hotmail).
One of the few complaints about the previous edition was that its sample code, while extensive, was all written in Visual Basic .NET. Great for VB.NET developers, not so great for C# developers. In this edition, everything presented in VB.NET is also presented in C#.
This edition has been fully updated to reflect ASP.NET changes associated with .NET Framework 1.1, the new version built into Windows Server 2003 and freely downloadable for Windows 2000 Server. These changes aren’t massive, but are significant. For example, ASP.NET 1.1’s new Request Validation feature can help you avoid many script injection attacks, by preventing your server from accepting content containing un-encoded HTML.
From its complete section on XML web services to its systematic review of upgrading “classic” ASP pages, ASP.NET Unleashed, Second Edition is the definitive resource for working ASP.NET developers. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.