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SharePoint users have known how useful Web parts are for a long time, but it wasn't until recently that every .NET developer had access to the ease and grace of Web parts using ASP.NET 2.0. Find out how you can use these handy content containers to create Web sites that put routine content sharing capabilities into the hands of your end users.

The wizard - a standard user interface element in desktop applications - takes the user through a series of discrete steps in order to accomplish some task. A wizard step typically includes instructions, input controls, and an interface for moving between the wizard's steps (typically Next and Previous buttons, with a Finish button at the last step). Furthermore, wizards often include different steps depending on the inputs chosen in previous steps.

Wizards have typically been the domain of desktop applications, but have recently become more prevalent in web applications. In ASP.NET 1.x, developers who wanted to implement a wizard-like user interface would often use multiple Panel Web controls, one for each Wizard step. As they user progressed through the wizard by hitting the Next and Previous buttons, the appropriate Panel could be displayed (have its Visible property set to True), while the others hidden (have their Visible properties set to False).

ASP.NET 2.0 makes creating wizard interfaces a lot less work thanks to its new Wizard control. With the Wizard control, we can define a series of Wizard steps and specify the content - static HTML and Web controls - that belongs in each step along with the function of the step, whether it's the first step, one step in the series of steps, the final step, or a summary step to appear after the wizard has completed. The Wizard control automatically includes the appropriate navigation elements for each step, remembers the values entered into the Web controls in each step, and includes a rich event model from which programmatic logic can be added to perform the desired task upon finishing the wizard (among other tasks)..

Web Parts is the brand new feature in ASP.NET 2.0. This feature supports personalized content and layout of a web page. This new feature or rather controls allows the user Change, Edit, Move the content of the web page as per their choices.

Explains how to customize ASP.NET pages on different mobile device types, how to support CSS and how to make user friendly ASP.NET mobile sites.

Explains how to make ASP.NET mobile applications by using ASP.NET Mobile Software Development kit (Mobile SDK).

Article featuring Improved paging through large result sets. The first approach uses a table variable, but utilizes the SET ROWCOUNT command to reduce the number of records read and inserted into the table variable. The second technique more cleverly uses SET ROWCOUNT to provide an even more efficient approach than the first.

This tip shares code that allows you to display ASP.NET DataGrid data in Excel.

This article discusses 10 features of ASP.NET 2.0 from a real-world perspective. It is not a core reference of classes and methods, but a user's guide with suggestions and trade-offs.

In this article we're going to cover some basic concepts on what you can do in order to make your ASP.NET application as spider and search engine friendly as possible.

A common pattern in web development is providing paged access to data. Rather than displaying the entire contents of a report or database table to an end user, developers often show only a subset of records per web page, with controls for moving from page to page. With ASP.NET 1.x, the DataGrid made paging incredibly simple - just set the AllowPaging property to True and add a few lines of code in the PageIndexChanged event handler and you were done! ASP.NET 2.0's GridView makes the process even simpler - just check the Enable Paging option from the GridView's smart tag - no code needed.

Of course nothing is free in life, and the tradeoff you make with the ease of checking a checkbox to enable paging (or, in the DataGrid's case, writing a couple lines of code) is performance. Out of the box, the DataGrid and GridView use default paging, which is a simple paging model that returns all of the records for each every page of data shown. When paging through small amounts of data (dozens to a hundred or so records), this inefficiency is likely outweighed by the ease of adding the feature. However, if you want to page through thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of records the default paging model is not viable.

The alternative to default paging is custom paging, in which you are tasked with writing code that intelligently grabs the correct subset of data. It requires a bit more work, but is essential when dealing with sufficiently-sized data...