ASP NET 3.5 For Dummies

Some professional developers would have you believe that the only effective way to create ASP.NET pages is to write the code by hand. (Do the words real men and quiche ring a bell here?) Their geeky noses have been stuck to the keyboard for so long they’ve been left behind. Microsoft has implemented powerful design-time tools in Visual Web Developer, so why not use them to be more productive? Wherever possible, I favor the drag, drop, choose, and configure methods over typing code. Here’s why:

• It’s faster. You don’t have to know — or even understand — the ins and outs of every object before creating something useful.
• You create fewer bugs. Microsoft’s built-in designers write quality code based on your choices.
• Pages are easier to maintain. Programmers are notorious for failing to document what their code performs and many insist that code is “self-documenting.” When you revise someone else’s code by rerunning a wizard, you spend less time playing catch-up.

You may have any number of reasons for digging into this ASP.NET book:

1. You volunteered to create a statistics Web site for your kid’s soccer league.
2. You’re putting your home-based business on the Web and need a data-driven page.
3. You develop Web sites on platforms like Java and PHP and want to make yourself more marketable by including Microsoft’s technology.
4. You’ve worked with a previous release of ASP.NET and want to get up to speed on new stuff like AJAX, LINQ, and the ListView control.
5. Your boss is dabbling in ASP.NET and might let you play in his sandbox if you talk a good enough game.
6. You collect For Dummies books and master each book’s subject before moving to the next one.

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