News

Guide to cooking up Web projects

• By Michael Alexander
• September 15, 2004

Cookbooks have always been popular, mainly because they feature step-by-step instructions, whether they're to bake cakes or cook up Web projects.

'ASP.NET Cookbook' by Geoffrey LeBlond and Michael Kittel is aimed at programmers who want a quick way to create dynamic, data-driven Web sites with Active Server Pages running on Microsoft Web servers.

ASP.NET, Microsoft's newest version of ASP, improves productivity and convenience because it is based on the .NET Framework and Microsoft's new object-oriented languages. It features drag-and-drop capability, introduces Web services and has a variety of other benefits designed to quicken development.

A drawback is that developers must devote considerable time to mastering this new Web application technology, according to the book's authors.

The 'ASP.NET Cookbook' features many plug-and-play solutions to problems commonly encountered when developing ASP.NET Web applications and services in the popular problem-solution-discussion format, reports O'Reilly publishers.

The coding solutions in the book appeal to inexperienced and expert programmers. For every problem addressed, there's a worked-out solution or recipe for a focused piece of code that Web developers can insert directly into their applications, O'Reilly says. The cookbook contains about 100 recipes for Web apps, and tips, tricks and possible pitfalls follow each recipe. This discussion allows developers to adapt problem-solving techniques to a myriad of similar situations, O'Reilly adds.

Among the topics covered are tabular data, validation, forms, user controls, error handling and maintaining state.

To widen the book's appeal, the authors have provided the source code used in their book in VB.NET and C#.

Links: For more on the 'ASP.NET Cookbook,' please go to http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/aspnetckbk/toc.html

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