ASP.NET Website Programming: Problem, Design & Solution

by Marco Bellinaso, Kevin Hoffman

Paperback: 600 pages
Publisher: Wrox Press Inc
ISBN: 1861006934; 1st edition (March 2002)

ASP.NET Website Programming shows you how to build an interactive website from design to deployment. Packed with solutions to website programming problems, this book will have you building well-engineered, extendable ASP.NET websites quickly and easily. With ASP.NET Website Programming you will learn to:
• Establish a solid, scalable website foundation
• Provide flexible user accounts integrating with ASP.NET's built-in security
• Create message forums that enable formatted messages but defend against cross-site scripting
• Generate revenue from advertising
• Build a web interface for uploading, downloading, editing, and managing the files on your site
• Add opinion polls, email newsletters, and news management
• Deploy the finished site on a live server • Build websites using good, n-tier coding techniques

The site we build is modular. You can slot the modules into your own website, modify them, or use them as examples of particular ASP.NET techniques.

The book's P2P forum is a platform for exchanging code and ideas, helping to extend the website with new modules and modifications

From the Publisher: This book is for developers who:
• Use ASP.NET and C#
• Use Visual Studio .NET Professional or above, or Visual C# .NET Standard
• Want to build content-based websites

Customer Reviews
Helpful in a real life programming way..., May 18, 2002
Reviewer: Joseph M. Pizzo from Penfield, NY United States
I am not usually a big fan of Wrox books, but this book is very good. It gives real life examples which are helpful to any web based programmer. Examples include how to build your own File Manager to cut out FTP completely or just to use when your on the road. They also include a large section on user authentication and site navigation. Another good part of this book is the format. They do not simply start devulging information, but use a real life step by step solution, including the problem, a design to solve the problem, and then pratical code to solve said problem. If your new to ASP.NET this would be a great and very pratical book to pick up, even if just for the great code examples that are available for download on the Wrox FTP site.

An outstanding work...well-written, very helpful, May 18, 2002
Reviewer: Jason A. Salas from Dededo, Guam
ASP.NET Website Programming - Problem, Design, Solution by Wrox Press

OVERALL ASSESSMENT
I had the pleasure of reading through this book over the course of a week, and I really let it sink it. I was very impressed with this work. This is a great book that the intermediate-to-advanced .NET developer should get their hands on. It's very well thought-out and the lessons are plainly stated, and easy to follow.

Authors Marco Bellinaso and Kevin Hoffmann describe a fictional content-based site that provides information for DVD and book enthusiasts, THEPHILE.COM. The book is essentially a long-form case study, diving into the architecture, infrastructure, and engineering behind an online publishing system.

The book takes a very honest approach and enforces a disciplined, structured methodology to writing an extremely practical (and cool!) n-tier Web app. The book also dives briefly into extending a few of THEPHILE.COM's various applications as desktop applications, which is a nice addition to make for a more well-rounded title.

You'll need a solid understanding of the .NET Framework, specifically ASP.NET, C#, and ADO.NET if you're to get the most out of this book, as it's definitely not for beginners. But it's a no-nonsense, well-prepared look at leveraging .NET Web technologies to your advantage.

There have been several books written to date profiling the design of an enterprise-level solution, like Sams' excellent "Building e-Commerce Sites with the .NET Framework." To cater to the masses, these books present a hypothetical business model, usually based around an e-commerce framework, and feature applications like shopping carts, inventory management utilities, etc. There really haven't been a whole lot of title that deal with simply-yet-prolific Web features like mass e-mail list managers, advertising engines, user polls, and article management - apps that are common to high-traffic Web sites.

On a personal level, I'm in charge of running several news-oriented Web sites, so on a personal level this book had more direct appeal to me, demonstrating how one could implement .NET technologies in efficiently managing content and interactives.

This is a very worthwhile buy (although Wrox apparently doesn't differentiate book length with book price, it being the typical US$59.95), and a great addition to your library. You'll read this one more than once for inspiration on your own projects.

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THE BOOK

The approach to designing the app is very intuitive - from promoting code reuse, object inheritance, modular component design in XML files, intelligent administration files, and much more. The end result is a big app that performs great and is largely self-sustaining.

The authors were very honest. This is most notable in their revelation that they didn't care much for the dragging-and-dropping DataAdapters within Visual Studio .NET, which leads to cumbersome code and a loss of control, preferring to code it themselves. I thought I was the only one. They also write THEPHILE.COM as if it were to be served on a commercial Web hosting service, which is a nice break from the assumption that we're all running massive data centers completely under our control in our offices.

The authors prominently cite Visual Studio .NET as their tool of choice for coding THEPHILE.COM, but don't neglect the text editor crowd, and present their work in a neutral way that doesn't alienate those choosing to stick to NotePad. This is a big advantage. A best practices approach to enterprise application design is exhibited throughout the book...and this is something the reader will pick up on, using a consistent method that promotes code reuse, componentization, interchangeability, separation of code from content, and modularity. I particularly liked Marco and Kevin's description of the design of their data access tier for their poll feature.

The book is succinct, to the point, and beautifully written. Unlike Wrox titles in years past, the book is a very easy 518 pages (12 chapters, no appendices). Although written 100% in C#, the code is quite easily transferable to VB.NET, for those interested. Is it just me...or has Wrox changed the binding on its books? While Wrox titles (at least in my library) have been the first to contract Broken Book Spine Syndrome, the front and back covers seemed more durable, and the book held very well. Which was a much-welcome change, I assure you. And this just isn't because this is a shorter title from Wrox...their entire .NET v1.0 line seems to be better built. The code download is well-documented, and both Marco and Kevin make themselves very accessible for feedback and help.

WHAT I FEEL NEEDS IMPROVEMENT
Although it's obvious in the book community that having documentation for the two major .NET languages in a single title (Visual Basic .NET and C#) is a tall order to fill (and most often doubles the size of a book), the fact that the book is exclusively in C# may detract some of those developers partial to VB.NET from partaking of what is a really good book. Perhaps the good folks at Wrox are considering releasing a VB.NET version? THEPHIILE.COM at the time of this writing doesn't exist on the Web...which was a minor downer. I was hoping to see the app running full-speed prior to trying the code out for myself, in the vein of the IBuySpy and ColdRooster demo projects. While it's unconscionable that each and every line of code would be put on paper, the book highlights some of the more notable code constructs.

Such an excellent book to the web developers, April 22, 2002
Reviewer: kannan thulasidas from Chicago,IL
I read this book from cover to cover. Now I feel very confident to design and develop a web site using ASP.NET. You have to have some priliminary knowledge about .NET , before you start to read this book.

Great Book, April 10, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from USA
I'm only a few chapters in but this is a great book. After learning ASP.NET basics I needed to see some real examples to get me started. This book has a whole website in it with explanations of how it is built. I hope theres an ecommerce book along the same lines available for when I finish this book - thats what I want to do next.

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