Book Description
This book will inspire you with a range of ideas on how data can be used to drive Web applications, and how that data can be most effectively utilized at each level of the design. Inefficient data use leads to the sort of slow, unresponsive Web applications that nobody enjoys using. By making good use of both server and client-side code, we can solve these problems. This book will arm you with the techniques you need to build Web applications that fly. The book is a voyage of exploration through almost all aspects of building ASP.NET applications that handle data and work across the Internet (or other HTTP networks, such as local Intranets). It takes a practical approach to building task-specific components, Web pages and Web applications based on a server running ASP.NET. The book focusses on n-tier architecture design and the way it can be coded, using SQL Server as a data source and simple Web server hardware. The ASP.NET code in this book is presented in VB.NET, while client-side code is presented in JavaScript. A C# version of the code is also available for download from the Wrox website along with the VB.NET. This book will cover: * The new .NET philosophy for managing relational and XML data * The techniques you need to make this philosophy work in the real world * Solid, n-tier architecture design * Using the .NET data management classes to access and update a data store * Maintaining data integrity by efficiently resolving concurrency errors * Techniques for building reusable, task-specific data tier components * How to design applications to exploit many different kinds of client device


From the Publisher
ASP.NET is a huge advance from previous incarnations of ASP, with one of its goals being pure HTML output that achieves maximum cross-browser compatibility. The server-side event architecture tends to engender this approach, but amid the first flush of excitement it's often forgotten that there's still a place for rich clients, and handling data in a multitude of places. Distributed data-driven applications aren't new, but the range of possibilities and ease of development have both increased with the introduction of .NET. This book concentrates on the use of ASP.NET for building applications for Internet or Intranet use, and looking at the possibilities that rich clients brings to both application design and a better user experience. There often appears to be confusion over how the new .NET data management and page-processing models fit into the overall distributed application architecture, how it changes this, and how it provides exciting new opportunities. So we spend some time exploring the whole architecture and design issue, and see how it can be addressed in different ways.


About the Author
Dave Sussman is a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. That's someone who likes playing with code and working out how things work, which is why he spends much of his life working with beta software. Luckily this coincides with writing about new technologies, giving him an output for his poor English and grammar. He lives in a small village in the Oxfordshire countryside. Like many programmers everywhere he has an expensive hi-fi, a big TV and no life. Alex Homer is a computer geek and Web developer with a passion for ASP.NET. Although he has to spend some time doing real work (a bit of consultancy and training, and the occasional conference session), most of his days are absorbed in playing with the latest Microsoft Web technology and then writing about it. Living in the picturesque wilderness of the Derbyshire Dales in England, he is well away from the demands of the real world – with only an Internet connection to maintain some distant representation of normality. But, hey, what else could you want from life?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

ASP.NET is a huge advance from previous incarnations of ASP, with one of its goals being pure HTML output that achieves maximum cross-browsercompatibility. The server-side event architecture tends to engender this approach, but amid the first flush of excitement it's often forgotten that there's still a place for rich clients, and handling data in a multitude of places. Distributed data-driven applications aren't new, but the range of possibilities and ease of development have both increased with the introduction of .NET.

This book concentrates on the use of ASP.NET for building applications for Internet or Intranet use, and looking at the possibilities that rich clients brings to both application design and a better user experience. There often appears to be confusion over how the new .NET data management and page-processing models fit into the overall distributed application architecture, how it changes this, and how it provides exciting new opportunities. So we spend some time exploring the whole architecture and design issue, and see how it can be addressed in different ways.

Author Biography: Dave Sussman is a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. That's someone who likes playing with code and working out how things work, which is why he spends much of his life working with beta software. Luckily this coincides with writing about new technologies, giving him an output for his poor English and grammar. He lives in a small village in the Oxfordshire countryside. Like many programmers everywhere he has an expensive hi-fi, a big TV and no life.

Alex Homer is a computer geek and Web developer with a passion for ASP.NET. Although he has to spend some time doing real work (a bit of consultancy and training, and the occasional conference session), most of his days are absorbed in playing with the latest Microsoft Web technology and then writing about it. Living in the picturesque wilderness of the Derbyshire Dales in England, he is well away from the demands of the real world ￯﾿ﾽ with only an Internet connection to maintain some distant representation of normality. But, hey, what else could you want from life?

SYNOPSIS

This book will inspire you with a range of ideas on how data can be used to drive Web applications, and how that data can be most effectively utilized at each level of the design. Inefficient data use leads to the sort of slow, unresponsive Web applications that nobody enjoys using. By making good use of both server and client-side code, we can solve these problems. This book will arm you with the techniques you need to build Web applications that fly.

The book is a voyage of exploration through almost all aspects of building ASP.NET applications that handle data and work across the Internet (or other HTTP networks, such as local Intranets). It takes a practical approach to building task-specific components, Web pages and Web applications based on a server running ASP.NET. The book focusses on n-tier architecture design and the way it can be coded, using SQL Server as a data source and simple Web server hardware.

The ASP.NET code in this book is presented in VB.NET, while client-side code is presented in JavaScript. A C# version of the code is also available for download from the Wrox website along with the VB.NET.

This book will cover: