Murach’s ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader’s Guide, C# Edition

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Murach s ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader s Guide, C# Edition

It s no secret that I found Murach s first ASP.NET guideto be one of the best ASP.NET educational manuals on the market. In fact, aquote from my review even appears on the back cover of ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader s Guide. (For the full review see Murach sASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET.) Having recently finishedreviewing two other ASP.NET 2.0 titles, I must admit that fatigue on the subjectwas starting to set in. I imagined what famous physicist Richard Feynman musthave felt like after serving on a review board for California seducational textbook evaluations (for those who aren t aware of this analogousreference, I implore you to read Ralph Leighton s transcriptions of hisconversations with the world-renowned physicist in the wonderfully entertainingbook, Surely You re Joking, Mr. Feynman).Yet with such a positive 5-star experience from Murach s first ASP.NET guide,my enthusiasm candle was relit and I dug into this book with high expectations.I am happy to report that I was once again thoroughly impressed with thequality and stickiness of the Murach teaching technique. Maybe it s just mystyle of learning, or maybe it s because the publisher has been perfectingtheir efforts for more than 30 years, but whatever magic dust is sprinkled intothese books, this new Murach title scores another 5-star review as a result.

This is an upgrader s guide to ASP.NET 2.0. Unlike theoriginal Web Programming title thatassumed no prior ASP experience, this book jumps right in and hits the groundrunning. Based on the ASP.NET 2.0 Go Live Beta 2 release, this book is alsoone of the most closely accurate to what will most likely be manifested in thefinal release of ASP.NET 2.0, and thus it should be relatively safe to spendthe time committing to memory the programmatic recommendations. As such, thebook expects readers to be working in front of the latest available release ofVisual Studio 2005. The guide is divided into four sections, with the firstproviding a summary of the enhancements made to the ASP.NET 2.0 release,working with the VS.NET 2005 IDE, and understanding the new master pagesfeature by building the front end for a Halloween products e-commerce Web site.

Section 2 targets data access and continues building onthe Halloween example to teach the consumption of object, SQL, and XML datasources in ASP.NET 2.0 applications. This section also delves into the detailsof Microsoft s new GridView, DetailsView, and FormView controls.

Section 3 expands on the specifics of the ASP.NET 2.0improvements by demonstrating the use of Microsoft s new site navigationcontrols (Menu, SiteMapDataSource, SiteMapPath, and TreeView components) and logincontrols (ChangePassword, CreateUserWizard, Login, LoginName, LoginStatus,LoginView, and PasswordRecovery components), understanding and applying theMembership and Roles classes, and showing how to create and manipulate useraccount profiles. Chapters on using the MultiView and Wizard controls, buildingand modifying site themes, creating and using Web parts for portal frameworks,and a handful of other interesting new ASP.NET 2.0 features and controls (suchas the new FileUpload, HiddenField, and ImageMap components) are also coveredin this section.

The last section, aptly titled ASP.NET 2.0 in Practice, is the shortest, focusing on the most important issues to be prepared for whenupgrading ASP.NET 1.x projects to the 2.0 version. The last chapter reviews howto configure and deploy an ASP.NET 2.0-based Web application. The book closeswith a single appendix that covers installing and configuring Visual Studio2005, as well as obtaining the book s code from the murach.com Web site.

Even with all this new ground to cover, the authors havestill managed to hold most of the page designs to the same design methodologyestablished in Murach s ASP.NET 1.0 book: the left page is reserved forexplanation and the right page is used for illustration and/or code layout. Thepage dimensions and weight of the book make this perfect for having the bookopen on the table while practicing the contents at the computer.

There is a sprouting mushroom patch of ASP.NET 2.0 booksfrom which developers can choose, but only a few of those titles are trulyworth the cover price. For readers already sold on Murach s ASP.NET 1.0 book,this new release is a no-brainer purchase decision. For those developersunfamiliar with the Murach approach who are open to trying a new, more conciseway of learning, I highly recommend picking up Murach s ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader s Guide, one of the best to digestfrom the latest .NET book harvest. If you need a nudge, check out Chapter 3, Howto use master pages ; it s available for free at http://www.murach.com/books/ugcs/chapters.htm.

Mike Riley

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Title: Murach s ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader s Guide, C#Edition

Author: DougLowe, Joel Murach

Publisher: MikeMurach & Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 1-890774-35-9

Web Site: http://www.murach.com/books/ugcs/index.htm

Price: US$39.50

Page Count: 526pages