ASP.NET 4 Unleashed at Dominant Systems Book Store

The most comprehensive book on Microsoft’s new ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET 4 Unleashed covers all facets of ASP.NET development. Led by Microsoft ASP.NET program manager Stephen Walther, an expert author team thoroughly covers the entire platform.

The authors first introduce the ASP.NET Framework’s basic controls and show how to create common site-wide layouts and styles. Next, they cover all aspects of accessing, presenting, organizing, and editing data. You’ll find thorough and practical sections on building custom components and controls, providing effective site navigation, securing sites and applications, and much more. This book presents hundreds of realistic code examples, reflecting the authors’ unsurpassed experience with ASP.NET both inside and outside Microsoft.

Build interactive Web Forms, validate form data, and upload files
Provide interactive calendars, wizards, site maps, and other valuable features
Design efficient, maintainable sites with Master Pages and Themes
Build data-driven applications with database controls, ADO.NET data access components, QueryExtender, LINQ to SQL, and WCF Data Services
Generate charts on the fly with the new Chart Control
Extend ASP.NET with custom controls and reusable components
Create site registration and authentication systems that store membership data in SQL Server or Active Directory
Use URL Routing to build dynamism, flexibility, readability, and SEO-friendliness into your URLs
Improve performance and scalability with caching and preloading
Maintain state with cookies, cookieless session state, and profiles
Localize, configure, package, and deploy ASP.NET applications
Use the ASP.NET MVC Framework to improve agility, testability, speed to market, and extensibility
Retrofit existing ASP.NET applications with Ajax and build pure client-side Ajax web applications
Construct a complete ASP.NET 4 website from start to finish

Customer Reviews & Comments
I read this book recently from the perspective of an experienced .NET developer who hasn't done much web application development for a while. I found it to be an excellent resource on ASP.NET, but I suspect that it might be a bit overwhelming for the novice. For the intermediate to advanced developer however, it's an invaluable reference. The subject matter is addressed in a sensible manner, with good explanations and examples. The order in which areas of ASP.NET are covered works well, moving from basic to more complex topics. I would recommend either reading this from cover to cover, or just dipping into it as a reference - both are useful. The reader is initially given a good introduction to the ASP .NET framework and how it works, moving to an explanation of some of the basic controls and how they should be used. The explanations and examples were good, and this section would probably be sufficient for a web developer to get up and running with the framework. Next, the authors mainly talk about centralised presentation - following on from part 1 this would probably be enough to get a web developer working on a real project in conjunction with a software engineer. The next section talks in detail about the basic mechanisms for consuming and displaying data; I particularly liked the thorough treatment of the GridView control. By the time you've finished with this section you'll be in a position to develop simple web applications that are consistently styled and able to retrieve and persist non-volatile data. Having said this, the book is structured more as a reference with examples, so IMO a novice may need to spend a bit of time on these sections playing around with the examples to gain a firm understanding of the concepts. Experienced .NET developers can skip over the coverage of component building in section 4, less experienced developers should probably use this section as a jumping-off point for more research on building n-tier applications in .NET. Having said this, it does cover the basics - so even a novice should be able to gain value from this section. The following detail on more advanced data access is excellent. The rest of the book is fairly advanced, and provides a comprehensive reference guide to other areas of ASP .NET, including scalability (via caching), an introduction to the MVC framework, security and deployment. This is definitely a book that will be staying within arm's reach for the next .NET web application project that I work on, and I would definitely recommend it to other developers - it is the most thorough and well structured ASP .NET reference I've come across.

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