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It's crucial to understand how your ASP.NET code compiles in order to debug your Web applications effectively. ASP.NET 2.0 has changed the way compilation and deployment works, and in this article I'll dig in and show you how compilation works now and what has changed from ASP.NET 1.x.

Programming for extensibility assures ease of maintainability in your design. Control templates offer this functionality to custom Web controls.

Accessing and displaying data from a Business Logic Layer can be accomplished without writing a line of code thanks to ASP.NET 2.0's ObjectDataSource control. The ObjectDataSource invokes a specified method of a class and returns the results.

Accessing and displaying data from a Business Logic Layer can be accomplished without writing a line of code thanks to ASP.NET 2.0's ObjectDataSource control. The ObjectDataSource invokes a specified method of a class and returns the results.

Many of the built-in ASP.NET server controls require additional, external resources in order to function properly. For example, when using any of the ASP.NET validation controls, the controls rely on a bevy of JavaScript functions to perform their client-side validation. While each validation control could emit such script directly into the page's content, a more efficient approach would be to package these JavaScript functions into an external JavaScript file and then include that file in the page using <script src="PathToExternalJavaScriptFile" type="text/javascript" >. This would reduce the total page size and would allow the browser to cache the external JavaScript file (rather than having to send the JavaScript code down to the browser on each and every page visit/postback).

Prior to ASP.NET 2.0, such external resources that needed to be accessible to the visitor's browser had to be implemented as actual files on the file system. If you've worked with ASP.NET 1.x's validation controls, your pages have included a reference to a JavaScript file /aspnet_client/system_web/version/WebUIValidation.js and there is an actual file with that name residing in the web application's root. Such external resources hamper deployment - if you deploy your application from the testing server to production, it's imperative that the production server have the same external resources (WebUIValidation.js, in this case), in the same locations in the file system.

To remedy this, ASP.NET 2.0 allows for external resources to be embedded within the control's assembly and then be accessed through a specified URL. With the external images, JavaScript files, CSS files embedded in the control's assembly, deployment is a breeze, as all of the resources are now contained within the assembly (the .dll file). There are no external resources whose file names and location on the file system must map up. Once embedded into the assembly, these resources can be accessed from an ASP.NET 2.0 web page through a special URL (WebResource.axd)..

The progress bar is great for keeping users informed about the progress of a task. Unfortunately, there's no progress bar element built into ASP.NET, so Dino Esposito solves that problem with his ProgressPanel control.

In this article, Joe Stagner presents some solutions for downloading files from ASP.NET sites so your users will have a fast, secure, and error-free downloading experience.

With the site map defined and the master page complete, we now have a consistent page layout and navigation scheme for our data-related tutorials. Now updating the site-wide page layout or site navigation information is a quick and simple process.

With the site map defined and the master page complete, we now have a consistent page layout and navigation scheme for our data-related tutorials. Now updating the site-wide page layout or site navigation information is a quick and simple process.

ASP.NET 2.0 has a lot of performance enhancements. In addition this article discusses on certain techniques which can improve the performance of applications.