ASP. Net Programmers Reference

by Jason Bell, Mike Clark, Andy Elmhorst, Matt Gibbs, Bruce Lee, Matt Milner, Jan Narkiewicz, Adil Rehan, John Schenken, Alex Homer

Paperback: 950 pages
Publisher: Wrox Press Inc
ISBN: 186100530X; 1st edition (October 15, 2001)

For any Web developer tackling Microsoft's new .NET platform, ASP.NET Programmer's Reference is the perfect guide to digging into the APIs and programming techniques you need to start writing in real projects.

While billed as a reference, which it surely is, this title is also a strong choice for a tutorial designed to get you working with the powerful .NET Framework in a hurry. Early sections set the stage with a comparison of the older ASP standard and the advantages of the new ASP.NET. The authors then dig right in with essential APIs that will get you started here, like using built-in objects for requests, sessions, and cookies. Short code excerpts in VB .NET and C# illustrate just how to do it.

The new choices for ADO.NET components will surely challenge new .NET programmers. This book excels at describing all of your options, from simpler HTML controls to the new Web Forms options. Standout sections include full coverage of the variety of list components available in ASP.NET, from simple lists to grids and Repeater controls. For wireless development, the authors reprise their coverage of controls with those available for PDAs and handhelds in Microsoft's Mobile Internet Toolkit.

Successful ASP.NET development requires more than using Web controls. A really useful section here tours the "core" .NET system classes for collections, regular expressions, and file I/O, which will let you perform basic tasks in your Web applications.

Later sections turn toward server-side options available in .NET, from caching pages for better performance to configuration options (using new configuration properties files), and a rich tour of the security options for ASP.NET programmers (including the new Microsoft Passport service). Rounding out this book is excellent coverage of the standards and classes you will need to implement Web services and XML, as well as a reference section with complete code examples for common ASP.NET tasks (including building a simple Web service).

The .NET Framework is powerful and complicated enough, but armed with ASP.NET Programmer's Reference, busy developers can master the most important classes and APIs in order to start creating the next round of Windows software on .NET.

Book Description: ASP.NET is a totally new way of creating dynamic web applications, giving developers more flexibility and functionality than ever before. Its fresh approach of placing commonly-used code into controls, and separating presentation from business logic, makes developing and maintaining applications far easier. It is part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, and as such allows code to be created in any language that the Framework supports (currently C#, VB.NET, and JScript.NET out of the box).

This reference is divided into four sections. The first covers all the important ASP.NET namespaces for User Interface design, while the second looks at "behind the scenes" topics like caching and configuration. The third section looks at the important new arena of Web Services, and finally, the fourth deals with the remaining hot topics, such as data access and XML, as well as containing a chapter of short, fully-working examples relating to all sections of the book, to help you understand the concepts being presented.

ASP. Net Programmers Reference covers:
• All major ASP.NET specific namespaces
• Caching
• Configuration
• Security
• Useful .NET Framework namespaces
• Web Services

From the Publisher: This book is for developers working with ASP.NET. It is designed to complement any of the books in Wrox's ASP.NET series, and to present information to you in a compact, illustrative, and easily browsed form.

About the Author: After eight years of developing software for the U.S. Air Force, Jason Bell is now an MCSD working as a consultant for Stroudwater NHG, a Microsoft Certified Partner located in Portland, ME.

Mike Clark is a senior analyst at Lucin and is responsible for salcentral.com. Mike predominantly now works in commercial aspects of web services having developed the web sites webservicewatch.com and webservicelibrary.com. He can be contacted at mikec@lucin.com.

Andy Elmhorst is a developer and writer who spends most of his time architecting and building web applications using Microsoft server technologies. He currently works for Renaissance Learning, Inc. and can be reached at andyelmhorst@hotmail.com.

Matthew Gibbs is a software developer at Microsoft where he has been working on Internet technologies and is currently working on the Mobile Internet Toolkit.

Alex Homer is a software developer and technical. He started playing with Microsoft's Active Server Pages technology right from the early Betas of version 1.0 (remember "Denali"?) - and has watched with awe and excitement as it has evolved into probably the most comprehensive server-side Web programming environment available today. You can contact Alex at alex@stonebroom.com....

Customer Reviews
Some useful information, but more errors and ommisions, April 18, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Houston, TX United States
I bought this book because I needed an ASP.NET reference. This book seems a bit schizophrenic. Part of it is tutorial and parts are reference. I haven't used it as much as I had hoped because I have run into several major errors.

Examples

Lists System.Data.ODBC when in fact this should be

Microsoft.Data.ODBC
Also forgot to mention the part about having to download it from MS website.

Lots of errors in ADO sections in general. I have tried several pieces of code from the book that simply don't work. I certainly don't recommend this book.

What ever happened to the REAL programmers reference books?, January 23, 2002
Reviewer: 4714394 from Coral Springs, FL United States
I'm afraid I'll have to call this book a failure. I feel that if I buy a "programmers reference" book it should be just that. If I go to System.Web.UI.WebControls I want to see a list off all the web controls and a concise breakdown of all the parameters of each. I don't want a story about the control and a "let's make a web page with this control" exercise. I long for the days of my C++ BIBLE.

Excellent book as a reference !, January 21, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Plantation, Florida United States
Excellent book for ASP.net as a reference.

Not for starting .net, December 16, 2001
Reviewer: timelas from Seattle, WA USA
This book tricked me into believing that all the code was going to be in c# and vb.net. The first two chapters had examples in both languages. Then, as soon as you hit Chapter 3, it drops the dual language examples. As a Java developer having to do a .net project quickly, I would NOT recommend this book. I guess I'll try again.

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