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Utilizing the more advanced features of the Data Web Controls has many developers stumped. These controls are fairly simple to use when it comes to simple data display. However, they can do much more than merely present data. For example, the DataGrid Web Control allows for sorting, paging, and editing of data. In addition, these controls allow for templating of data, which can be used to provide more complex views. The DataGrid, DataList, and Repeater forum on the Microsoft ASP.NET Forums received more than 2,100 posts in the first month and a half of use, or over 35 posts per day on average. As the Web master of an ASP.NET Web site, Scott has also received numerous emails from readers and visitors asking questions about these Web Controls. ASP.NET Data Web Controls is likely to be an indispensable item in every ASP.NET developer's toolbox.

ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX is Microsoft's Ajax tool for ASP.NET developers and this book covers the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX final release. You’ll learn how to use the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX features in order to create richer, more responsive dynamic Web sites. The book walks you through examples for each featured element, demonstrating how the client and server interact to produce a better Web application, and reviews such topics as client framework, script manager control, networking stack, application services, partial page updates, control extenders, client form elements, and client behaviors.

Essential ASP.NET 3.5 Skills--Made Easy!

Learn how to create database-driven ASP.NET 3.5 websites using C# 3.0. ASP.NET 3.5: A Beginner's Guide shows you just what you need to know to build rich Internet applications quickly and easily. You'll find details on Web controls, CSS, event handlers, validation, SQL, ADO.NET, data binding, text files, and security. Coverage of the latest technologies, such as LINQ and Ajax, is also included. All examples use Visual Studio 2008 to ease you through the learning process, and all the source code is displayed. Start building dynamic ASP.NET 3.5 Web applications today with help from this fast-paced tutorial.

Designed for Easy Learning:

• Key Skills & Concepts--Lists of specific skills covered in the chapter
• Ask the Expert--Q&A sections filled with bonus information and helpful tips
• Try This--Hands-on exercises that show how to apply your skills
• Notes--Extra information related to the topic being covered
• Tips--Helpful reminders or alternate ways of doing things
• Annotated Syntax--Example code with commentary that describes the programming techniques being illustrated

"Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP .NET Applications" covers performance tuning and optimization for ASP.NET applications. Currently, the market is being flooded with a slew of books on how to write .NET applications, but, so far, there has not been a title that is devoted to the more advanced topic of tuning an ASP.NET application for maximum performance. There will be an increasing demand for this information as developers get comfortable with the technology and begin completing first versions of their ASP.NET applications. They will be looking for a book that dispenses with basic language tutorials, and instead tackles the real-world issues of performance. Intermediate to experienced developers, who are either working on an ASP.NET development project or are about to start one, will find "Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP .NET Applications" helpful for its concise information on how to design and write ASP.NET applications for optimal performance. These developers will already have a foundation with .NET technology, so Jeffrey Hasan will dispense with basic tutorials on how to write .NET code. Instead, Hasan will highlight what to use and what to avoid when coding for optimal performance. This will include a range of details that affect performance, from the very granular (e.g., working with strings) through to the broader (e.g., working with ViewState and Session State). Hasan will also cover the tools that are available for monitoring ASP.NET application performance, and will give the reader clear guidance on how to apply these tools to their project. These tools include Performance Monitor (with its new counters for .NET), Microsoft's Web Application Stress (WAS) tool, and Microsoft Application Center (that ships with Visual Studio Enterprise Edition).

• Eight minibooks cover ASP.NET basics, Web controls, using HTML and ASP, C#, Visual Basic, database programming, using the .NET Framework, and advanced ASP.NET 2 (including themes, custom server controls, and Web parts)
• The ideal resource for Web programming newcomers as well as the 1.5 million existing ASP developers who want a complete ready-reference that covers the new ASP.NET 2 updates
• More than double the size of ASP.NET 2 For Dummies (0-7645-7907-X), the latest edition of the bestselling ASP beginner book that boasts combined sales of more than 100,000 copies across all editions
• Written by veteran Dummies author Doug Lowe, who is renowned for his ability to explain complex topics in plain English

To be a successful ASP.NET 4 developer, you need to know how to apply the vast array of new functionality available in the latest release of the .NET 4 Framework and Visual Studio 2010.

This book will immerse you in a variety of advanced topics, including architecting different application data tiers, memory caching paradigms, data mining, and search engine optimization. Working through step-by-step exercises using P/LINQ, DLR, MEF, MVC, IronPython, Axum, and Ajax, you will learn a variety of approaches to building each of the key application tiers common to all web solutions.

Using a proven technique of illustrating advanced concepts with functional solutions, all topics in the book are modeled on a fully operational content management system (CMS), built from the ground up. This ensures that you’ll be introduced to real-world examples that demonstrate the full functionality of the .NET 4 Framework for ASP.NET, and that you’ll be able to apply your new skills to any web development situation.

"No one knows ASP.NET like Fritz Onion. And no one knows .NET security like Keith Brown. Combine the two and what do you get? The most comprehensive and enlightening book on ASP.NET 2.0 industrywide. I'm sure you'll find the book you're holding was worth every penny."

--Aaron Skonnard, member of technical staff and cofounder, Pluralsight

"Essential ASP.NET 2.0 gets under the hood and dismantles the engine before your eyes. Fritz and Keith understand that we as developers need to understand how it works and this book does exactly that. Their explanation of the ASP.NET 2.0 page event sequence is worth the price of the book alone."

--Shawn Wildermuth, Microsoft MVP (C#), "The ADO Guy"

"Essential ASP.NET 2.0 is an incredibly useful must-read for any developer.Many books drag you through theory and mindless detail, but this one actually sets up the problems you may encounter with ASP.NET 2.0 and rolls out the alternatives."

--Patrick Hynds, Microsoft Regional Director and President, CriticalSites

"This book is essential for any ASP.NET developer moving from version 1.x to 2.0. Onion and Brown not only cover the new features, but provide a wealth of insight and detail about how to use them effectively."

--Ron Petrusha, author of Visual Basic 2005: The Complete Reference

"Drawing on their deep technical knowledge and real-world experience, Fritz and Keith take the reader into some of the less explored and much improved areas of ASP.NET such as diagnostics and state management and performance. Readers will turn to this book over and over again."

--John Timney, Microsoft MVP, Senior Web Services Consultant,British Telecom

"Fritz and Keith, both established developers and writers in our industry, have succeeded again--enlightening us on the latest advancements found in ASP.NET 2.0. If you're new to ASP.NET or a seasoned veteran, you'll benefit tremendously from their overview, analysis, and sample code."

--Joe "MSJoe" Flanigen

"This book seeks not only to explain how to effectively build Web sites with ASP.NET, it also gives the reader an idea of how the process works. This insight is essential to creating applications that work with the infrastructure rather than fighting it."

--Justin Burtch, Vice President, Newbrook Solutions

Essential ASP.NET 2.0 is the Microsoft developer's definitive reference for ASP.NET 2.0 programming. It covers all you need to know to build robust, well-designed Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and .NET 2.0. ASP.NET MVP Fritz Onion and Developer Security MVP Keith Brown draw on their unparalleled experience working with ASP.NET 2.0 and teaching it to professional developers. From data binding to security, UIs to performance, they demystify ASP.NET 2.0's most difficult areas, and introduce little-known techniques for leveraging it to the fullest.

The perfect companion to his previous classic, Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C#, Essential ASP.NET 2.0 offers hundreds of new C# examples that illuminate today's best Web development practices. (Both C# and VB 2005 versions of all code examples can be downloaded from the companion Web site.)

Topics explored in-depth include:

• Application architecture
• Code behind
• Master pages
• Themes and skins
• Navigation controls
• Data binding
• State management
• Security
• Web Parts
• Diagnostics
• Performance optimization
• Asynchronous tasks and pages

Simply put, if you want to design and build better ASP.NET 2.0 Web applications, Essential ASP.NET 2.0 delivers everything you need: insider's knowledge, proven best practices, and outstanding code samples.

This Wrox Blox will teach you how to work with the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature set. Rather than being a new data access technology or some new approach to querying the database, a Dynamic Data web site helps abstract the user interface controls needed to present the data in your database. You will learn to model the database in LINQ to SQL and apply a variety of metadata attributes to the model. These attributes and their arguments will allow field templates to adapt to the context of the application. Furthermore, this Wrox Blox will teach you how to build specialized user controls called field templates that respond to the metadata information applied to database models. You will see how to push validation rules and custom business logic out of the user interface layer and down to the model layer. Finally, you will learn how to secure scaffolding pages that provide full editing capabilities to your database tables.

Table of Contents

Exploring a Dynamic Data Web Site 1

Prerequisites 2

Create the Web Site 2

Building Blocks 6

Understanding Model Metadata 7

Display Name 9

Required 9

Regular Expression 9

String Length 9

UI Hint 9

Range 9

Display Format 10

Scaffold Column 10

Metadata Type 10

Display Column 10

Scaffold Table 10

Building Custom Field Templates 10

Build the URL Field Templates 11

Validating against Custom Business Logic 19

Validate Unique E-Mail Addresses 20

Move the Data Context to a Separate Assembly 22

Secure the Scaffolding 25

Add ASP.NET Membership Services 25

Secure Scaffold Pages 28

Wrapping Up 29

About the Author 30

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As the Internet user experience (UX) progresses, more users are demanding and expecting their custom-built business applications to provide the same UX that they see on the Internet every day. ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Unleashed empowers ASP.NET developers to easily provide this type of experience with minimal code. Author Rob Foster has built AJAX-enabled web applications for a number of major corporations and uses the experience he has gained there to explain concisely, clearly, and completely what ASP.NET developers need to learn to start taking advantage of the rich opportunities made possible by ASP.NET AJAX.

• Learn ASP.NET AJAX by working with real-world examples
• Use the ScriptManager and ScriptManagerProxy controls in your ASP.NET AJAX-enabled applications
• Leverage the ASP.NET AJAX client-side API to maximize the flexibility of ASP.NET AJAX
• Build applications that use the UpdatePanel and Timer controls
• Use the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to provide rich AJAX functionality to your web applications
• Build ASP.NET AJAX-enabled extender controls
• Integrate ASP.NET AJAX and .NET 3.5 with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Create ASP.NET AJAX-enabled Windows Vista Gadgets
• Learn advanced AJAX concepts such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and WCF Web services

Introduction 1

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction to AJAX Technologies 5

AJAX and Web 2.0 6

Why Use AJAX? 7

AJAX Rationale 7

AJAX: An Example 8

The XMLHttpRequest Object 8

A Simple AJAX Library 10

Using the AJAX Library 14

Summary 20

Chapter 2 Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX 21

Introducing the Visual Studio Controls 22

ScriptManager 22

ScriptManagerProxy 23

Timer 23

UpdatePanel 23

UpdateProgress 23

Introducing the Visual Studio Projects and Web Site Items 24

Projects 24

Web Site Items 25

Introducing the AJAX Control Toolkit 26

Summary 27

Part II Working with ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

Chapter 3 The ScriptManager and ScriptManagerProxy Controls 31

About the ScriptManager Control. 31

ScriptManager Properties, Methods, and Events 34

JavaScript Proxy Classes for Web Services 37

Partial-Page Rendering 43

Summary 47

Chapter 4 The ASP.NET AJAX Client API 49

The Namespaces 49

Global 49

Sys 52

Sys.Net 53

Sys.Serialization 54

Sys.Services 62

Sys.UI 66

Sys.WebForms 68

Summary 71

Chapter 5 The UpdatePanel and Timer Controls 73

About the UpdatePanel Control 73

Using the UpdatePanel Control 74

Advanced Features of the UpdatePanel Control 78

Triggers 78

Multiple UpdatePanel Controls on a Single Page 81

The Timer Control 89

Using the Timer Control with Partial-Page Rendering 90

Summary 92

Chapter 6 Advanced Techniques with the ASP.NET AJAX PageRequestManager Object 93

Using the PageRequestManager Object 93

A Practical Example of the PageRequestManager Object 95

Summary 100

Chapter 7 Using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit 101

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: The Controls 102

Using Controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit 105

Configuring Visual Studio to Use the Toolkit 105

The Accordion and AccordionPane Controls 106

The CalendarExtender Control 110

The CollapsiblePanelExtender Control 112

The ConfirmButtonExtender Control 118

The DragPanelExtender Control 120

The DropDownExtender Control 122

The FilteredTextBoxExtender Control 125

The HoverMenuExtender Control 127

The TextBoxWatermarkExtender Control 130

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: A Practical Example 134

Using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit with Microsoft Expression Web 145

Configuring Expression Web for the ASP.NET AJAX

Control Toolkit 145

Summary 150

Chapter 8 Building an ASP.NET AJAX Extender Control 151

Add ASP.NET Controls 151

How to Build an Extender Control 154

Server-Side Code 156

Client-Side Code 159

Summary 163

Chapter 9 ASP.NET AJAX and SharePoint 2007 165

SharePoint and AJAX 165

Modifying Web.Config 166

Developing an AJAX-Based SharePoint Web Part 171

Summary 177

Chapter 10 Creating ASP.NET AJAX-Enabled Vista Sidebar Gadgets 179

Vista Sidebar Gadgets 179

Creating the Gadget 181

Create the Web Service 181

Generate the JavaScript Proxy 183

Create the Vista Gadget 186

Test the Gadget 187

Summary 188

Part III Appendices

Appendix A Microsoft Expression Web 191

An Introduction to the Expression Web Interface 191

Creating Web Pages and Web Sites 191

Customizable Interface 194

Creating Standards-Based Web Sites 198...