This fast-paced book looks like an ideal way to jumpstart your ASP.NET 2.0 experience. It has coverage of all of the new bits and had me tapping away at my keyboard in no time

ASP.NET is the fastest-growing Web development platform in the world today. It powers some of the biggest Web sites and applications in the world—a shortlist of well-known customers include: Dell Computer, Merrill Lynch, the London Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, JetBlue Airways, USA TODAY, Home Shopping Network, Weight Watchers, Bank One, and Century 21.

Before .NET, Visual Basic was not just another language—it was a platform unto itself. Building applications in Visual Basic 6.0, for example, was completely different from using C++ and MFC. With .NET, this distinction is gone, and Visual Basic is indeed just another .NET language that uses the same libraries, the same development tools, and the same runtime as all others.

Before .NET, Visual Basic was not just another language—it was a platform unto itself. Building applications in Visual Basic 6.0, for example, was completely different from using C++ and MFC. With .NET, this distinction is gone, and Visual Basic is indeed just another .NET language that uses the same libraries, the same development tools, and the same runtime as all others.

XML powered Web forms—is an overhaul to HTML forms from 1993. On-line forms are critical to electronic commerce on the Internet, and the HTML forms design from 1993 is now beginning to show its age. The advent of XML on the Web and the subsequent move to Web Services as a means of connecting disparate information technologies to deliver end-to-end customer solutions have now made XML documents central to the fabric of the Web.

ASP.NET is Microsoft's answer to the aforementioned problems and many others that were not explicitly stated. It is a fundamental rewrite of ASP that has been in process for more than two years. The ASP team took a close look at the problems facing Web developers and created a brand new platform in the spirit of traditional ASP to solve those problems. Having used ASP.NET for a considerable amount of time, we can conclusively say they hit a home run with this release.

Microsoft has endowed Web developers with a gift. Since its introduction to the masses in beta form in 2001, the .NET Framework and its ASP.NET subset have changed the way we look at building Web applications. Indeed, before this time, many of us didn't even think in terms of applications but rather collections of loosely related scripts that together formed a Web site.

ASP.NET web applications are composed of individual ASP.NET web pages. As we will see in numerous examples throughout this book, these ASP.NET web pages can display HTML, collect user input, and interact with databases. ASP.NET web pages contain a mix of both HTML markup and source code. It is the source code of an ASP.NET web page that allows for the more advanced features, such as accessing data from a database or sending an email from an ASP.NET web page.

This book is aimed at developers who are reasonably familiar with the Web, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the C# language. We have tried to avoid using code or concepts that are obscure or unduly complex, instead concentrating on the techniques and technologies in ASP.NET 2.0.

This book is the culmination of those activities, and I hope it helps you in your path to understanding ASP.NET 2.0.

Developing early mobile applications was frustrating and challenging. With the Mobile Internet Toolkit, we can spend a fraction of the time it once took to produce an application and then immediately access it from a wide variety of browsers, including those that support HTML, cHTML, and WML. Now how cool is that?

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