Programming ASP.NET, Second Edition

Preface

ASP.NET is the successor to Microsoft’s “classic” ASP technology, the world’s leading web development tool. ASP.NET solves many of the problems associated with ASP and provides an integrated and consistent approach to software development that builds on the libraries and languages of the .NET platform.

About This Book

This book will teach you all you need to know to be effective with ASP.NET. We assume you have some background with either C# or Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), or sufficient programming experience to pick up what you need to know from the examples shown. Experience with “classic” ASP will help, but it is not required.

ASP.NET is not difficult. All of the concepts are straightforward, and the Visual Studio .NET environment greatly simplifies the process of building powerful web applications. The difficulty in ASP.NET is only that it is so complete and flexible that there are many pieces that must be woven together to build a robust, scalable, and efficient application.

Since there are two authors’ names on this book, you might be concerned that the tone will be uneven. Every possible measure has been taken to avoid this. Although each chapter was initially written by one author, all chapters were edited by both. Then every chapter was extensively edited and rewritten by Jesse Liberty to give the book a single voice. And if that weren’t enough, the chapters were subsequently edited by the O’Reilly editors, and then again by the authors. The bottom line is that while ...