Professional Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 19. Working with ASP.NET 3.5

The introduction of ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 changed the Web programming model, and ASP.NET 3.5 is just as revolutionary in the way it increases the productivity of .NET developers. The primary goal of ASP.NET is to enable you to build powerful, secure, and dynamic applications using the least possible amount of code. This chapter covers some of the exciting features provided by ASP.NET 3.5 and most of what the ASP.NET technology offers.

The Goals of ASP.NET

ASP.NET 3.5 is a substantial release of the product and an integral part of the .NET Framework 3.5. This release of ASP.NET heralds a new wave of development for AJAX-enabled applications and provides a new means of coding a rich application.

ASP.NET 3.5 has specific goals to achieve. These goals are focused around developer productivity, administration, and management, as well as performance and scalability. After working with ASP.NET, you will find that these goals have indeed been achieved.

Developer Productivity

Much of ASP.NET's focus is on productivity. Huge productivity gains were made with the release of ASP.NET 1.x — could it be possible to expand further on those gains?

The ASP.NET development team's ongoing goal has been to eliminate much of the tedious coding that ASP.NET originally re0quired and to make common ASP.NET tasks easier. After the release of the first version of ASP.NET, the Microsoft team developing ASP.NET has had the goal of reducing by two-thirds the number of lines of code required ...