Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce in C#, From Novice to Professional (2009)

Welcome to Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce From Novice to Professional in C#: From Novice to Professional!
This book is a practical, step-by-step ASP.NET and SQL Server tutorial that teaches you
real-world development practices. Guiding you through every step of the design and build process,
this tutorial will teach you how to create high-quality, full-featured, extensible e-commerce
web sites.

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Over the course of the book, you will develop the necessary skills to get your business up on
the Web and available to a worldwide audience. In each chapter, you will implement and test
new features of your e-commerce web site, and you will learn the theoretical foundations required
to understand the implementation details. The features are presented in increasing complexity
as you advance throughout the book, so that your journey will be as pleasant and painless as
possible. By the end of the book, you’ll understand the concepts and have the knowledge to
create your own powerful web sites.
Owners of previous editions of this book will find that a large part of it has been rewritten
and many features have been added, as a result of the developments in the web development
scene, and as a result of the extensive feedback we’ve received from the readers of the previous
editions. Now you’ll find the book teaches you how to implement search engine optimization,
how to implement product attributes, how to use SQL Server’s full-text searching, and many
other exciting features.
Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce From Novice to Professional in C# is very good for beginners.
The case study in this book is presented in three phases of development. The first phase
focuses on getting the site up and running as quickly as possible, and at a low cost. Although not
yet full-featured, at the conclusion of this phase your site will have a fully functional, searchable
product catalog, and will be capable of accepting PayPal payments, enabling you to begin generating
revenue immediately.
Phase 2 concentrates on increasing revenue by improving the shopping experience. In this
phase, you’ll learn how to encourage customers to buy more by implementing a dynamic product
recommendation mechanism. You’ll also implement your own custom shopping cart, replacing
that provided by PayPal.
In the third phase, we’ll show you how to increase your profit margins by reducing costs
through automating and streamlining order processing and administration, and by handling
credit card transactions yourself. You’ll also learn how to integrate external functionality through
web services (with a practical example of integrating Amazon.com products in your site), and
improve your customer’s shopping experience by adding product review functionality.
We hope you’ll enjoy reading our book, and that you’ll find it useful and relevant to your
development projects!
How This Book Is Structured
This book is divided into three parts consisting of 22 chapters. We cover a wide variety of topics,
showing you how to
• Build a product catalog that can be browsed and searched
• Design relational databases, and write SQL Server queries and stored procedures
• Use the SQL Server full-text search feature to implement product searching
• Implement search engine optimization features
• Implement the catalog administration pages that allow adding, modifying, and removing
products, categories, and departments
• Create your own shopping basket and checkout mechanism
• Increase sales by implementing product recommendations and product reviews
• Handle payments using PayPal and DataCash
• Implement a customer account system
• Integrate Amazon.com web services to sell Amazon.com items through your web site
The following brief roadmap highlights how we’ll take you from novice to professional
regarding each of these topics.

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Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in C# (2012)

ASP.NET is Microsoft’s platform for developing web applications. Using ASP.NET, you can create e-commerce
shops, data-driven portal sites, and just about anything else you can find on the Internet. Best of all, you don’t
need to paste together a jumble of HTML and script code in order to program the Web. Instead, you can create
full-scale web applications using nothing but code and a design tool such as Visual Studio.
The cost of all this innovation is the learning curve. To master ASP.NET, you need to learn how to use
an advanced design tool (Visual Studio), a toolkit of objects (the .NET Framework), and an object-oriented
programming language (such as C#). Taken together, these topics provide more than enough to overwhelm any first-time web developer.

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Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in C# assumes you want to master ASP.NET, starting from the basics. Using this

book, you’ll build your knowledge until you understand the concepts, techniques, and best practices for writing

sophisticated web applications. The journey is long, but it’s also satisfying. At the end of the day, you’ll find that

ASP.NET allows you to tackle challenges that are simply out of reach on many other platforms.

About This Book

This book explores ASP.NET, which is a core part of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is not

a single application—it’s a collection of technologies bundled into one marketing term. The .NET Framework

includes languages such as C# and VB, an engine for hosting programmable web pages, a model for interacting

with databases (ADO.NET), a higher-level framework for performing queries (LINQ and the Entity Framework),

and a class library stocked with tools for everything from reading files to validating a password. To master ASP.NET, you need to learn about each of these ingredients.

This book covers all these topics from the ground up. As a result, you’ll find yourself learning many

techniques that will interest any .NET developer, even those who create Windows applications. For example,

you’ll learn about component-based programming, you’ll discover structured error handling, and you’ll see how

to access files, XML, and relational databases. You’ll also learn the key topics you need for web programming,

such as state management, web controls, and caching. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to create your own

rich web applications and make them available over the Internet.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is aimed at anyone who wants to create dynamic websites with ASP.NET. Ideally, you’ll have experience with

a previous version of a programming language such as C or Java. If not, you should be familiar with basic programming

concepts (loops, conditional structures, arrays, and so on), whether you’ve learned them in Visual Basic, Pascal,

Turing, or a completely different programming language. This is the only requirement for reading this book.

Understanding HTML and XHTML (the markup languages used to write web pages) will help you, but it’s

not required. ASP.NET works at a higher level, allowing you to deal with full-featured web controls instead of raw

web page markup. However, you’ll get a quick overview of HTML5 fundamentals in Chapter 4, and you’ll learn

about CSS, the Cascading Style Sheet standard, in Chapter 12.

This book will also appeal to programmers who have some experience with C# and .NET but haven’t

worked with ASP.NET in the past. However, if you’ve used a previous version of ASP.NET, you’ll probably be more

interested in a faster-paced book such as Pro Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in C# instead.

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Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C# (2003)

I was drawn to Microsoft explicitly for the opportunity to work on ASP.NET. It had a different name at that
point, but the promise was to build a language-neutral, compiled Web platform that was friendly enough for
the novice, and powerful and performant enough for the world's largest Web sites. I was intrigued by that
promise, and working on it has indeed been a fascinating and rewarding journey.


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The Web platform is built on the new Microsoft developer platform: the .NET Framework and the Common
Language Runtime. This platform offers a rich set of services and capabilities upon which the Web
application model was built. This platform let us change many of the rules of the game. For example, it
became possible to have performance approaching the realm of compiled native code without losing the
benefits of the rapid development experience associated with scripting environments.
Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C# (2003) was designed with a grand goal: to be a comprehensive platform for developing and delivering
dynamic content to the Web. Among the challenges that entails is building a system with appeal to many
different backgrounds and competencies: the Web developer scripting applications with Active Server Pages
or other systems, the Visual Basic forms developer, and the ISAPI developer. What evolved was a rich
platform that can be approached gradually, leveraging one's existing skills to become productive quickly,
and then acquiring new skills to take advantage of new features of the platform.
The team started by building on the considerable merits of Active Server Pages and then expanding from
there, constantly asking how tasks could be made easier and expressed in fewer lines of code. Support for
declarative design, aided by good tools, was a key design goal. While this was being done, there was a
constant awareness that the system must be extensible and support the sorts of advanced usage that many
real-world, highly scalable Web sites demand.
An oft-repeated mantra during the development of ASP.NET was "No black boxes!" This is a goal that the
development team intends to continue working on for quite some time, and it involves a commitment to a
factored architecture that can be extended or customized to suit the problem at hand, whatever that might
be. As a result, the core ASP.NET primitives are modularized and have a rich extensibility model.
In the following pages, you'll learn about where the points of extensibility are and how to use them. Fritz
has carefully chosen the key concepts and explained how to weave them into an application. The critical
building blocks of real Web applications are all well represented: request processing, pages and controls,
configuration, error handling, security, caching, data presentation, and state management.
To develop ASP.NET applications, one does not need to understand the whole of what is a vast and complex
system. However, as one begins to build more complex applications with challenging requirements, a
thorough grounding in the basics and a reliable guide to what lies beyond become truly indispensable.
And with that, I commend the following work to you. It succeeds admirably as a guide to ASP.NET. It leads
the reader through a solid understanding of the ASP.NET architecture and the core tenets of building Web
applications. It then moves into more advanced applications of the technology that are indispensable for
solving many of the real-world problems that face Web applications today. I think that the reader will agree
that this work is indeed an essential guide to getting the most from Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C# (2003).

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C# How to Program C# Deitel and Deitel

Welcome to C# and the world of Windows, Internet and World-Wide-Web programming
with Visual Studio and the .NET platform! This book is the second in our new .NET How
to Program series, which presents various leading-edge computing technologies in the context
of the .NET platform.

C# is the next phase in the evolution of C and C++ and was developed expressly for
Microsoft’s .NET platform. C# provides the features that are most important to programmers,
such as object-oriented programming, strings, graphics, graphical-user-interface
(GUI) components, exception handling, multithreading, multimedia (audio, images, animation
and video), file processing, prepackaged data structures, database processing,
Internet and World-Wide-Web-based client/server networking and distributed computing.
The language is appropriate for implementing Internet- and World-Wide-Web-based applications
that seamlessly integrate with PC-based applications.

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The .NET platform offers powerful capabilities for software development and deployment,
including independence from a specific language or platform. Rather than requiring
developers to learn a new programming language, programmers can contribute to the same
software project, but write code using any (or several) of the .NET languages (such as C#,
Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET and others) with which they are most competent. In
addition to providing language independence, .NET extends program portability by
enabling .NET applications to reside on, and communicate across, multiple platforms—
thus facilitating the delivery of Web services over the Internet. The .NET platform enables
Web-based applications to be distributed to consumer-electronic devices, such as cell
Preface XXXIX
phones and personal digital assistants, as well as to desktop computers. The capabilities that
Microsoft has incorporated into the .NET platform create a new software-development paradigm
that will increase programmer productivity and decrease development time.
New Features in C# How to Program
This edition contains many new features and enhancements, including:
• Full-Color Presentation. This book is now in full color. Full color enables readers
to see sample outputs as they would appear on a color monitor. Also, we now syntax
color the C# code, similar to the way Visual Studio .NET colors the code in its
editor window. Our syntax-coloring conventions are as follows:
comments appear in green
keywords appear in dark blue
literal values appear in light blue
text, class, method and variable names appear in black
errors and ASP .NET directives appear in red
• “Code Washing.” This is our term for the process we use to format the programs
in the book so that they have a carefully commented, open layout. The code appears
in full color and is grouped into small, well-documented pieces. This greatly
improves code readability—an especially important goal for us, considering that
this book contains approximately 23,500 lines of code.
• Web Services and ASP .NET. Microsoft’s .NET strategy embraces the Internet
and Web as integral to the software development and deployment processes. Web
services—a key technology in this strategy—enables information sharing, commerce
and other interactions using standard Internet protocols and technologies,
such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). Web services enable programmers
to package application functionality in a form that turns the Web into a library
of reusable software components. In Chapter 21, ASP .NET and Web
Services, we present a Web service that allows users to make airline seat reservations.
In this example, a user accesses a Web page, chooses a seating option and
submits the page to the Web server. The page then calls a Web service that checks
seat availability. We also present information related to Web services in Appendix
P, Crystal Reports® for Visual Studio® .NET, which discusses popular reporting
software for database-intensive applications. Crystal Reports, which is integrated
into Visual Studio .NET, provides the ability to expose a report as a Web service.
The appendix provides introductory information and directs readers to a walkthrough
of this process on the Crystal Decisions Web site (www.crystaldecisions.
com/net).
• Web Forms, Web Controls and ASP .NET. Application developers must be able
to create robust, scalable Web-based applications. The .NET platform architecture
supports such applications. Microsoft’s .NET server-side technology, Active
Server Pages (ASP) .NET, allows programmers to build Web documents that respond
to client requests. To enable interactive Web pages, server-side programs
process information users input into HTML forms. ASP .NET is a significant deXL
Preface
parture from previous versions of ASP, allowing developers to program Webbased
applications using the powerful object-oriented languages of .NET. ASP
.NET also provides enhanced visual programming capabilities, similar to those
used in building Windows forms for desktop programs. Programmers can create
Web pages visually, by dragging and dropping Web controls onto Web forms.
Chapter 20, ASP .NET, Web Forms and Web Controls, introduces these powerful
technologies.
• Object-Oriented Programming. Object-oriented programming is the most widely
employed technique for developing robust, reusable software, and C# offers enhanced
object-oriented programming features. This text offers a rich presentation
of object-oriented programming. Chapter 8, Object-Based Programming, introduces
how to create classes and objects. These concepts are extended in Chapter
9, Object-Oriented Programming: Inheritance, which discusses how programmers
can create new classes that “absorb” the capabilities of existing classes. Chapter
10, Object-Oriented Programming: Polymorphism, familiarizes the reader with
the crucial concepts of polymorphism, abstract classes, concrete classes and interfaces,
which facilitate powerful manipulations among objects belonging to an inheritance
hierarchy.
• XML. Use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) is exploding in the softwaredevelopment
industry, the e-business and e-commerce communities, and is pervasive
throughout the .NET platform. Because XML is a platform-independent technology
for describing data and for creating markup languages, XML’s data
portability integrates well with C#’s portable applications and services. Chapter
18, Extensible Markup Language (XML), introduces XML. In this chapter, we introduce
basic XML markup and discuss the technologies such as DTDs and Schema,
which are used to validate XML documents’ contents. We also explain how
to programmatically manipulate XML documents using the Document Object
Model (DOM™) and how to transform XML documents into other types of documents
via Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).
• Multithreading. Computers enable us to perform many tasks in parallel (or concurrently),
such as printing documents, downloading files from a network and
surfing the Web. Multithreading is the technology through which programmers
can develop applications that perform concurrent tasks. Historically, a computer
has contained a single, expensive processor, which its operating system would
share among all applications. Today, processors are becoming so inexpensive that
it is possible to build affordable computers that contain many processors that work
in parallel—such computers are called multiprocessors. Multithreading is effective
on both single-processor and multiprocessor systems. C#’s multithreading capabilities
make the platform and its related technologies better prepared to deal
with today’s sophisticated multimedia-intensive, database-intensive, networkbased,
multiprocessor-based distributed applications. Chapter 14, Multithreading,
provides a detailed discussion of multithreading.
• ADO .NET. Databases store vast amounts of information that individuals and organizations
must access to conduct business. As an evolution of Microsoft's ActiveX
Data Objects (ADO), ADO .NET represents a new approach for building
Preface XLI
applications that interact with databases. ADO .NET uses XML and an enhanced
object model to provide developers with the tools they need to access and manipulate
databases for large-scale, extensible, mission-critical multi-tier applications.
Chapter 19, Database, SQL and ADO .NET, details the capabilities of ADO .NET
and the Structured Query Language (SQL) to manipulate databases.
• Visual Studio .NET Debugger. Debuggers are programs that help programmers
find and correct logic errors in program code. Visual Studio .NET contains a powerful
debugging tool that allows programmers to analyze their programs line-byline
as those programs execute. In Appendix D, Visual Studio .NET Debugger, we
explain how to use key debugger features, such as setting breakpoints and “watches,”
stepping into and out of procedures, and examining the procedure call stack.
• COM (Component Object Model) Integration. Prior to the introduction of .NET,
many organizations spent tremendous amounts of time and money creating reusable
software components called COM components, which include ActiveX®
controls and ActiveX DLLs (dynamic link libraries) for Windows applications. In
Appendix H, COM Integration, we discuss some of the tools available in Visual
Studio .NET for integrating these legacy components into .NET applications. This
integration allows programmers to use existing sets of COM-based controls with
.NET components.
• XML Documentation. Documenting program code is crucial for software development,
because different programmers often work on an application during the
software’s lifecycle, which usually includes multiple versions and can span many
years. If programmers document software code and methods, other programmers
working on the application can learn and understand the logic underlying the code,
thus saving time and avoiding misunderstandings. To automate documenting programs,
Visual Studio .NET provides an XML tool for C# programmers. Appendix
E, XML Documentation, explains how a programmer can insert comments in the
code, which produces a separate file providing the code documentation.
• Career Opportunities. Appendix C, Career Opportunities, introduces career services
available on the Internet. We explore online career services from both the
employer’s and employee’s perspectives. We list many Web sites at which you
can submit applications, search for jobs and review applicants (if you are interested
in hiring someone). We also review services that build recruiting pages directly
into e-businesses. One of our reviewers told us that he had used the Internet as a
primary tool in a recent job search, and that this appendix would have helped him
expand his search dramatically.
• Unicode. As computer systems evolved worldwide, computer vendors developed
numeric representations of character sets and special symbols for the local languages
spoken in different countries. In some cases, different representations were
developed for the same languages. Such disparate character sets hindered communication
among computer systems. C# supports the Unicode Standard (maintained
by a non-profit organization called the Unicode Consortium), which
maintains a single character set that specifies unique numeric values for characters
and special symbols in most of the world’s languages. Appendix G, Unicode, discusses
the standard, overviews the Unicode Consortium Web site (www.uniXLII
Preface
code.org) and presents a C# application that displays “Welcome to Unicode!”
in several languages.
• XHTML. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has declared HTML to be a
legacy technology that will undergo no further development. HTML is being replaced
by the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML)—an XMLbased
technology that is rapidly becoming the standard for describing Web content.
We use XHTML in Chapter 18, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and
offer an introduction to the technology in Appendix K, Introduction to XHTML:
Part 1, and Appendix L, Introduction to XHTML: Part 2. These appendices overview
headers, images, lists, image maps and other features of this emerging markup
language. (We also present a treatment of HTML in Appendices I and J,
because ASP .NET, used in Chapters 20 and 21, generates HTML content).
• Accessibility. Although the World Wide Web has become an important part of
many people’s lives, the medium currently presents many challenges to people
with disabilities. Individuals with hearing and visual impairments, in particular,
have difficulty accessing multimedia-rich Web sites. In an attempt to improve this
situation, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched the Web Accessibility
Initiative (WAI), which provides guidelines for making Web sites accessible
to people with disabilities. Chapter 24, Accessibility, describes these guidelines
and highlights various products and services designed to improve the Web-browsing
experiences of individuals with disabilities. For example, the chapter introduces
VoiceXML and CallXML—two XML-based technologies for increasing the
accessibility of Web-based content for people with visual impairments.
• Bit Manipulation. Computers work with data in the form of binary digits, or bits,
which can assume the values 1 or 0. Computer circuitry performs various simple
bit manipulations, such as examining the value of a bit, setting the value of a bit
and reversing a bit (from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1). Operating systems, test-equipment,
networking software and many other kinds of software require that programs communicate
“directly with the hardware” by using bit manipulation. Appendix O, Bit
Manipulation, overviews the bit manipulation capabilities that the .NET Framework
provides.

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ASP.NET 4 Unleashed by Stephen Walther

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.

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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 Unleashed .
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

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What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010)

What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010)
ASP.NET MVC is the new Framework for building web applications released by Microsoft at the
beginning of 2009. It adopts an approach that is completely different from the traditional Web
Forms one that was introduced with the release of the .NET Framework in 2002: Instead of using
an event-based programming style, ASP.NET MVC implements the Model-View-Controller
pattern so that it’s easier to achieve a better separation of concerns and it’s easier to make the
application extensible and testable.

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Version 1.0 has been downloaded and used by almost 1 million developers in the first year after its
final release, becoming more and more popular every month. But some thought that it was still too
unfinished for enterprise development, mainly because it was missing some important features
like client-side validation. In March 2010, after one year, version 2 of the Framework has been
released, whose main focus is to enhance productivity and make the Framework ready for
enterprise development.
ASP.NET MVC 2 is built on top of the first release and is completely compatible with it, which
means that all of your knowledge, skills, and even the code you wrote continue to work when you
move forward to the new version.
ASP.NET MVC 2 adds the following new features, which will be covered in detail through the rest
of this Wrox Blox:
Templated Helpers — Make it easier and faster to create the HTML to display and edit data.
Client-Side Validation — Brings the same powerful metadata-based validation to the client.
Areas — Allow you to organize a big application into smaller logical sections.
❏
❏
❏
What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2?
Asynchronous Controllers — Solve the same issue addressed by the asynchronous pages in
traditional Web Forms by performing long-running tasks on a separate thread to free up
resources on the server.
Child Actions — Make easy encapsulation of logic and presentation possible.
Strongly Typed UI Helpers — Add a new strongly typed flavor to the existing UI Helpers.
And in addition to these main features, other smaller features and enhancements to the existing ones
have been introduced, together with a better Visual Studio (VS) integration, especially in VS2010.
To make the migration to the new version easier, ASP.NET MVC 2 can be installed side-by-side with
ASP.NET MVC 1.0, which means that on the same server you can have applications written in V1 and
others written in V2, making it easier to adopt the new version for new applications while taking your
time to upgrade the older ones.

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ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls, For .NET Framework 3.5 (2009)

ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls, For .NET Framework 3.5

THE ASP.NET PLATFORM POWERS millions of websites around the

world today, and is perhaps one of the most productive platforms for web

development. During the nearly ten years of its development and use,

ASP.NET has formed around itself a strong community and vibrant ecosystem

of developers.

Download ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls, For .NET Framework 3.5 (2009)

The page framework and the associated server controls framework are

quintessential to the success of ASP.NET and its developer experience, programming

model, and extensibility. Writing this Foreword brings back

memories of early ASP.NET days, and reminds me of the continued evolution

of the framework as a platform alongside the Web.

In the late 1990s, the Web was very much a nascent application platform.

Browsers brought potential for new levels of reach, but offered few and

varying degrees of capabilities (remember HTML 3.2?), and concepts such

as “stateless programming model” presented an odd paradigm shift. Server

controls provided a set of familiar abstractions and created a componentbased

rapid application development (RAD) programming experience for

the Web (à la Visual Basic) and allowed developers to feel at home as they

started to look to the Web to build the next generation of data-driven applications.

Flash forward a few years, and in 2006, the AJAX buzz created a

renewed interest in the Web as the application platform. Today, AJAX is

mainstream and, quite literally, everywhere. It enables building interactive

experiences that users have come to expect. Still, it brings new but similar

xxv

challenges: varying browser APIs and an unfamiliar script-based programming

model. Once again, ASP.NET (and in particular, server controls)

provided a mechanism for creating a productive development model for

incorporating AJAX-based techniques, and for encapsulating server and

client behaviors into a familiar and consistent component model.

ASP.NET provides an end-to-end AJAX story. Traditional server controls

create a simple server-centric AJAX programming model, but they are

just a part of the story. This new generation of server controls leverages an

AJAX script framework that independently enables a client-centric AJAX

programming model. The core framework is complemented by the AJAX

Control Toolkit, which offers both a compelling set of out-of-the-box components

and an open source project for further developing the ASP.NET

AJAX stack. I am excited to see this end-to-end story uncovered and unfold

itself over the course of this book.

In this book, Adam and Joel focus on providing a beyond-the-basics drill

down of the inner workings and extensibility of the ASP.NET AJAX framework

by covering the programming patterns established by the script

framework, the architecture, and the techniques to create AJAX-enabled

server controls. They also cover advanced but still relevant topics such as

localization and error handling. By providing a conceptual guide to understanding

and extending the framework, this book is sure to serve any application

or component developer who is looking to unlock the true potential

of ASP.NET AJAX.

—Nikhil Kothari

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