Table of Contents
To my dadI know youd be proud
About the Author
Imar Spaanjaars graduated in Leisure Management at the Leisure Management School in the Netherlands, but he quickly changed his career path into the Internet world.
After working for a large corporation and doing some freelance work, he now works for Design IT (www.designit.nl), an IT company in the Netherlands specializing in Internet and intranet applications built with Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET 3.5. As a technical director and software designer, hes responsible for designing and building medium- to large-scaled e-commerce web sites and portals.
Hes also the tech lead for Dynamicweb Nederland, the Dutch branch of the popular Danish Content Management System Dynamicweb (www.dynamicweb.nl).
Imar has written books on ASP.NET 2.0 and Macromedia Dreamweaver, all published under the Wrox brand. He is also one of the top contributors to the Wrox Community Forum at p2p.wrox.com, where he shares his knowledge with fellow programmers.
Imar lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with his girlfriend, Fleur. You can contact him through his personal web site at http://imar.spaanjaars.com.
Credits
Acquisitions Director
Jim Minatel
Development Editor
Brian Herrmann
Lead Technical Editor
Peter Lanoie
Technical Editors
Alexei Gorkov
John Dunagan
Robert Searing
Editorial Manager
Mary Beth Wakefield
Production Manager
Tim Tate
Vice President and Executive Group Publisher
Richard Swadley
Vice President and Executive Publisher
Joseph B. Wikert
Project Coordinator, Cover
Lynsey Stanford
Compositor
Laurie Stewart, Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Proofreaders
Kathryn Duggan
David Parise
Rachel Gunn
Indexer
Melanie Belkin
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is probably one of the most exhausting but fun and rewarding things I have ever done. During writing you have to invest a lot of time and effort to put your ideas down into something that is worth reading by others. After the hard work is done and the book is written, the reward comes from readers like you who send me e-mails, contact me through my web site, or participate in the online discussion forums at p2p.wrox.com to discuss the book.
As Norman Mailer put it, writing a book is the closest that men ever get to childbearing. Although I think there is probably some truth in that statement, I also realize there is one big difference: writing a book is not something you have to do on your own. Although only my name is on the cover, I owe a lot to many people who helped me write this book.
First of all Id like to thank Jim Minatel from Wiley for asking me to pick up this project and having faith in my ability to bring it to a good end. I would also like to thank Brian Herrmann for his editorial work. I know it wasnt always easy with the number of reviewers we had, but I think it turned out pretty well.
I am very thankful for the work done by the technical editors on this book: Alexei, John, and Rob thanks, guys, for all your hard work! I particularly want to thank the lead technical editor, Peter Lanoie, who has made a major contribution, both in shaping the direction of the book and in assuring its technical accuracy. Thank you, Peter!
I am also very glad for the support I got from the people at Design IT. Thanks to all who have reviewed my work and participated in my discussions on the books direction.
Another person I owe a lot to is Anne Ward from Blue Violet, a UK-based web and graphic design company. Anne has done most of the designs used in this book, which I highly appreciate. Thanks, Anne! The concert pictures you see in this book come from her good friend Nigel D. Nudds, who kindly let me use pictures from his collection.
Finally, I would like to thank my lovely girlfriend, Fleur. You may get tired of hearing it, but I really appreciate the support you have given me throughout this project. I couldnt and wouldnt have done it without you!
Introduction
To build effective and attractive database-driven web sites, you need two things: a solid and fast framework to run your web pages on and a rich and extensive environment to create and program these web pages. With ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Web Developer 2008 you get both. Together they form the platform to create dynamic and interactive web applications.
ASP.NET 3.5 builds on top of its popular predecessor ASP.NET 2.0. While maintaining backward compatibility with sites built using this older version, the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 in general and ASP.NET 3.5 in particular add a lot of new, compelling features to the mix.
Continuing the path of less code that was entered with the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, ASP.NET 3.5 lets you accomplish more with even less code. New features like LINQ that are added to the .NET Framework allow you to access a database with little to no handwritten code. The integration of Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax into the ASP.NET Framework and Visual Web Developer means you can now create fast-responding and spiffy web interfaces simply by dragging a few controls onto your page and setting a few properties. This book gives you an in-depth look at both of these technologies.
The support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language to lay out and format web pages, has undergone a major overhaul in Visual Web Developer. The design-time support, that shows you how a page will eventually look in the browser, has been vastly improved. Additionally, Visual Web Developer now ships with a lot of tools that make writing CSS a breeze.
However, drag-and-drop support and visual tools are not the only things youll learn from this book. ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Web Developer 2008 come with a great and extensive set of tools to help you program your web applications. These tools range from the new LINQ syntax that allows you to query data and databases in your web applications, to the vastly improved debugging capabilities that allow you to debug your application from client-side JavaScript all the way up into your server-side code, all with the same familiar user interface, commands, and actions.
Under the hood, ASP.NET 3.5 makes use of the same run time as version 2.0. This ensures a great backward compatibility with that version, which means that ASP.NET 2.0 applications continue to run under the new framework. But dont be fooled by the fact that the run time hasnt changed. Although the technical underpinnings needed to execute your web application havent changed, the .NET 3.5 Framework and ASP.NET add a lot of new features, as youll discover in this book.
Probably the best thing about Visual Web Developer 2008 is its price: its available for free. Although the commercial versions of Visual Studio 2008 ship with Visual Web Developer, you can also download and install the free Express Edition. This makes Visual Web Developer 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5 probably the most attractive and compelling web development technologies available today.
Whom This Book Is For
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