Inside ASP.NET

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Inside ASP.NET

Microsoft s.NET technology is, in my opinion, some of the coolest technology to come outof Redmond in recent memory. It s going torevolutionize how people build Web sites. But, before people start buildingcool sites, they must wade through the documentation to figure out how to doit. Scott Worley s Inside ASP.NET is designed to help guide newdevelopers through ASP.NET to start building good applications quickly.

The bookgives a good introduction to the key ASP.NET topics required to start buildingapplications. It mentions the key languages, but it uses VB .NET as its examplelanguage. It s easy enough to convert between the languages, so that shouldn tbe a concern (see my article There and Back Again, asp.netPRO April2002). Beginning with the fourth chapter, the examples become significantlybetter and more useful for readers to adapt for their own projects. The bookcovers topics I haven t seen in other books that came out after .NET beta 2,such as message queues, transaction processing, encryption, and decryption.

The bookalso includes a full-blown project, a common feature in recent books. In thisbook, you build a project-tracking tool, complete with a database, an objectmodel using custom-built classes, and security using the built-in formsauthentication features that are already getting popular. For many developers,this is the best way to learn the tool because they can reverse-engineer thecode to solve their own problems.

Unfortunately,the book has some problems, as well. The first few chapters and six of theseven appendices for the most part are simply lists of properties with lessdocumentation than that provided in the .NET Framework. Most of the lists inthe second chapter are simply copied from the Microsoft documentation, withsome minor wording changes. These lists seem to add to the page count withoutadding any value to the book. There are also some typos and text-formattingissues that could lead to errors in code, such as two hyphen characters convertedinto a single long dash (called an em-dash). Unfortunately, this occurs in anHTML comment, which requires two dashes to work properly; someone typing in thecode without noticing this is going to get the wrong result.

The bookalso seems to breeze through important topics that can cause problems forprogrammers converting from ASP classic programming. For starters, there s nocoverage of the VB .NET language. The book does not recommend any prerequisitesin the introduction or on the back cover, so a reader should expect to getcoverage of the language. There are some incorrect statements in the sectionnamed Migration from Classic ASP to ASP.NET, such as this: ASP.NET offers fullsyntax and processing compatibility with classic ASP applications. Developersjust need to change file extensions from .asp to .aspx to migrate their filesto the .NET Framework. This is simply not the case and is certainly not a goodthing to recommend to new developers. I took an ASP page from my own Web siteand tried this, only to receive a server error message. According to theauthor, it should have worked just fine. Chapter 2 proves my point by listingthe incompatibilities between VB .NET and VBScript. Blanket statements likethis not only give incorrect information, but they give new developers thesense that ASP.NET is simply ASP version 4.0, which is far from the truth.

Inshort, if you can make use of the middle section of the book, it might be worthlooking into. The content on message queuing, security, and transactionservices is fairly useful. But, because at least 150 pages of the book arestraight out of the Microsoft documentation, you probably can do better with adifferent title to help you learn ASP.NET.

Eric Smith

Inside ASP.NET by Scott Worley, New Riders, http://www.newriders.com.

Rating:

ISBN: 0-7357-1135-6

Cover Price: US$49.99

(700 pages)