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The Caching Application Block's provider mechanism lets you create a custom provider that stores cached data anywhere you want. It was this that made me wonder if it was possible to cache data within or through a web service, which would allow the provider to cache its data almost anywhere—remotely or locally—without having to write specific code that is directly integrated within Enterprise Library.

The principle is simple enough. Instead of having the backing store provider within the Caching Application Block interact directly with the backing store (the usual approach, as implemented in the Isolated Storage provider and Database provider), the backing store provider simply packages up the data and sends it to a web service..

"Web application development has come a long way in a fairly short period of time." A quote like that surely won't send anyone into shock anytime soon because it's accepted as fact. From basic, static HTML pages to totally data-driven and data-centric Web applications, the demands on a Web developer are much more complex and demanding than they were just a few years ago. The advent of social networking sites like MySpace, which is written in ASP.NET 2.0, interactive mapping sites, and sites streaming full motion video has required the Web developer to adapt and change with the times. One of the best tools to use to build these types of Web applications is Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0. In this article I am going to delve into some of the more interesting features of ASP.NET 2.0 and show you how you can begin using ASP.NET 2.0 on your next Web project.

In this article we will see just how easy it is to display XML data in an ASP.NET 2.0 page. In particular, we will build a User Control that will display the contents of an RSS feed. Once created, this User Control can be dragged onto the Design surface of any ASP.NET page in your project and configured to display the contents of a particular RSS feed by simply setting the control's Url property to the URL of the RSS feed.

Using custom policy injection, you can configure and apply policies exactly the way you want them, doing it right requires a little effort.

Learn how to use AOP injection techniques to add, remove, and modify logging, validation, caching, exception handling, authorization, and performance measurements in your ASP.NET applications—without having to recompile your code.

In .NET Web applications you can find that in many places custom classes and collections are better choices than the DataSet or DataTable. The custom classes or the custom class collections, which are truly object oriented, allow developers to employ all object-oriented programming techniques.

Unfortunately, .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2005 don’t provide good support of the custom class. As a result, developers often encounter the following three barriers around using the custom class.

DataSet and DataTable are Microsoft’s solutions to these problems. Microsoft provides lots of built-in support of DataSet and DataTable in their development tools and in the .NET Framework library. But the DataSet and DataTable are far from object-oriented. Besides, they have lots of overhead.

The latest version of ASP.NET, version 2.0, supports several new and exciting features that promise to enhance developer productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance. One of these features is precompilation, which either developers or administrators can use to precompile ASP.NET applications before they are deployed. Moreover, the new precompilation feature can detect and provide warnings about any compilation failure issues, and lets you deploy applications without the need to store the source code on the deployment server. Precompilation can both reduce application response time and improve performance. This article explains how to use the new feature effectively.

In the past year, new technologies from Microsoft have changed how we can add ink to Web sites and the change is definitely for the better! One small property added to ASP.NET 2.0 server controls, OnClientClick, has had a big impact on simplifying the process of moving ink from the Web page to the Web server. The capability that OnClientClick provides, allowing developers to tie both a client-side event and a server-side event to one Click event, was actually achievable prior to ASP.NET 2.0 using control attributes, but it was more complex to set up and not very discoverable..

The Health Monitoring system in ASP.NET 2.0 is designed to monitor the health of a running ASP.NET application in a production environment. It works by recording event information to a specified log source. The .NET 2.0 Framework includes a variety of built-in events that can be used by the Health Monitoring system, including events for monitoring application re-starts and stops, unhandled exceptions, and failed authentication attempts, among others. The .NET Framework also include support for logging these events to the Windows event log, to a Microsoft SQL Server database, via WMI, in an email, and to the ASP.NET page tracing system.

In this article we will continue our exploration of the built-in events and log sources. In particular, we will look at the WebFailureAuditEvent event, which is raised when there is a security audit failure. We will also look at the SimpleMailWebEventProvider event provider, which, as its name implies, sends event information via email.

ASP.NET version 1.x did not include any built-in logging and notification system and therefore required a little bit of code or configuration effort from the developer. ASP.NET 2.0, however, provides built-in Health Monitoring facilities that make it a snap to configure a website to record events to the event log, a database, via WMI, in an email, or to the ASP.NET page tracing system. Moreover, the Health Monitoring system was created using the provider design pattern, making it possible to implement our own logging logic.

This is the start of a series that explores the ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring system. In this article we will examine the basics of Health Monitoring and see how to setup Health Monitoring to log events to a SQL Server database..