ASP.NET 2.0 Beta Preview

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding overview of V2 for experienced ASP.NET devs
Review: Bill Evjen, one of the most prolific writers on all things ASP.NET, presents his latest technical literary offering with his overview of the Beta 1 release of ASP.NET 2.0. I've been playing with ASP.NET 2.0 since the early alpha bits, and I got a lot of out of this title.

Admittedly not a primer for the .NET neophyte, Bill dives right into the major changes in the architectural, infrastructure and syntactical concerns facing next-gen web developers. The book is a quick read, containing 16 succinct but not light chapters on the major areas of building and administering ASP.NET web applications. Although the book takes a slight slant towards Visual Basic .NET, nearly all the code samples are presented in both VB .NET and C#.

The book's high points, in my humble opinion, are evident in the "Membership and Role Management", "Personalization", "Additional New Controls" and "Changes to 1.0 Controls" chapters, being an outstanding breakdown of V2's improvements and new features for those respective topics.

Also to be appreciated is a great compendium featuring the new languages shipping with both VB .NET 8.0 and C# 2.0, including new enhancements to both languages like generics, partial classes and anonymous methods. He also breaks down new language-specific improvements, such as VB .NET's new keywords and C# iterators.

In criticism, I would have liked to see a discussion of authoring the revamped custom control development model, which the book didn't cover. But in Bill's defense, that respective programming convention isn't quite finished yet. The only other thing lacking would be more descriptive ASP.NET 2.0 APIs, which is usually a hallmark of Wrox-produced texts (the only area to get such treatment in this title is the WebParts/Portal Framework APIs). But then again, moving towards more declarative programming is one of V2's goals, so this may be intentional.

With the exception of Bill looking a bit harried on the cover, it's a masterful work: well-rooted in the ASP.NET fundamentals while accommodating advanced topics, accompanied by relevant, code-heavy examples, all written in Bill's very appreciated friendly voice, with the right timely intermingling of humor.

Bravo and cheers, Bill! Great work!

Rating:
Summary: For VB users & beginners only
Review: I was unimpressed by this book. MSDN documentation was 10x better, they failed to include any reference to Remote Scripting or Callback methods, they didn't add in any reference of how to use client side script handlers or a number of features you would expect that are included in 2.0. If you want an update to all the past controls that you already know then this is great, if you want to delve deeply into the advanced new features of ASP.NET 2.0 then I don't recommend this. The author also is obviously a VB developer but pads the book by using a generic converter for most of his code, quite a poor display in my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Beta, Remember Beta, Not Yet a Bible.
Review: Note that this is a book based on the Beta release of the software. Usually, emphasize usually, Microsoft Beta software is actually pretty far along and most of the changes from Beta to production are really just bug fixes and not changes in the look, feel, and functionality of the product. But this is not to guarantee that changes won't be included in the final release.

The biggest change I can see in ASP.NET 2.0 is on their approach to eliminate much of the intense coding that ASP.NET required. ASP.NET was quite verbose - doing a program was rather like writing War and Peace, and you had better be exactly right in your spelling, grammer, and punctuation. The goal was to reduce the amount of code needed by two thirds. And it appears that they've accomplished this.

The next major point seems to be that ASP.NET is integrated more closely with the rest of .NET. You use Visual Studio 2005 to build any type of .NET component, including ASP.NET. When microsoft says Integrated Development Environment, they mean it. All of their applications are tied together, some loosely, some more tightly, and the indications are that in the future they will be much more tightly.

All in all, this book is just what it says, a Beta Preview. It presumes some understanding of version 1, and tells you what's happening in version 2. It is amazing to see the amount of access and availability to resources within Microsoft that Mr. Evjen had to produce this book

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive, terse, guide to 2.0
Review: This is a very well written guide to the new features in ASP.NET 2.0. The new controls are covered in depth, as are portals and personalization. Themes and skins are given their own chapter. The book is code and screenshot heavy. Exposition is kept to the bare minimum and sometimes less. The material is also terse and advanced enough to only be suitable for those who are familiar with ASP.NET 1.0.