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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...

Many classic ASP applications exist side-by-side with newer ASP.NET applications, sometimes leading to a need to transfer or share information between the two. This article shows one method of transferring such information securely.

Learn how to install and run your ASP.NET applications on systems without IIS in three easy steps.

This article provides a step-by-step introduction on Localization in ASP.NET 2.0 using the Visual Studio 2005.

When creating ASP.NET 2.0 applications, developers commonly store sensitive configuration information in the Web.config file. The cannonical example is database connection strings, but other sensitive information included in the Web.config file can include SMTP server connection information and user credentials, among others. While ASP.NET is configured, by default, to reject all HTTP requests to resources with the .config extension, the sensitive information in Web.config can be compromised if a hacker obtains access to your web server's file system. For example, perhaps you forgot to disallow anonymous FTP access to your website, thereby allowing a hacker to simply FTP in and download your Web.config file. Eep.

Fortunately ASP.NET 2.0 helps mitigate this problem by allowing selective portions of the Web.config file to be encrypted, such as the section, or some custom config section used by your application. Configuration sections can be easily encrypted using code or aspnet_regiis.exe, a command-line program. Once encrypted, the Web.config settings are safe from prying eyes. Furthermore, when retrieving encrypted congifuration settings programmatically in your ASP.NET pages, ASP.NET will automatically decrypt the encrypted sections its reading. In short, once the configuration information in encrypted, you don't need to write any further code or take any further action to use that encrypted data in your application.

In this article we'll see how to programmatically encrypt and decrypt portions of the configuration settings and look at using the aspnet_regiis.exe command-line program. We'll then evaluate the encryption options ASP.NET 2.0 offers. There's also a short discussion on how to encrypt configuration information in ASP.NET version 1.x.

ASP.NET 2.0 brings enhanced performance and many new features that make the web developer's life easier. Alex Homer takes you through what's new.

Many developers are familiar only with the high-level .NET frameworks like Web Forms and Web services that sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. This article discusses the lower-level aspects of ASP.NET and explains how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime and then through the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline to process requests.

Online Article: Top-Ten Annotations and Remarks about the Wonderful and Powerful New Set of Features in ASP.NET 2.0

You'll still write a good deal of code in ASP.NET 2.0.Don't completely trust those who say that ASP.NET 2.0 cuts 70% of the amount of code you're called to write. You'll end up writing more or less the same quantity of code, but you'll write code of different quality. You'll have more components and less boilerplate code to tie together pages and controls. Features like the provider model, data source controls, and master pages make coding easier and equally effective. But since there's no magic behind, you have to learn the implications of each feature you employ. In the end, ASP.NET 2.0 comes with code behind, not magic behind.