ASP.NET 2.0

From a developer's perspective

By Andrea Saltarello, Technical Director of Managed Designs and MVP for ASP.NET in Milan, Italy

Let's say it straight and loud: both Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET version 2.0 add tons of features in order to boost developers productivity. Packed up with a new web forms designer capable of both producing and validating XHTML markup, Visual Studio 2005 ships a brand new projectless development mode that permits you to directly edit folders or even single markup files without the need to set up a virtual directory by means of Internet Information Services. Moreover, for the simplest development tasks, you won't need IIS at all, thanks to the integrated web server, which supports debugging and allows for in-place directory publishing and local browsing.

ASP.NET version 2 addresses the issues that emerged developing applications with previous versions, allowing you to write much less boilerplate code and implement both core and advanced features in less time. As a developer, the first feature you'll notice is master page support, which adds a powerful templating engine to the toolkit: while you will create templates at design time only, you'll be able to apply them both at design and runtime. Where the master page support will enable you to design pages which can be rendered with different layouts (for example to target different browsers or mobile devices), you'll enjoy having the chance to create skinnable applications, thanks to the new theme engine. As for master pages, you can apply themes both at design and runtime. Together, master pages and themes support empowers us to create highly adaptable applications, offering a vastly improved user experience.

Web forms now aren't anymore tied to the postback model, and can submit their content to other pages thanks to the added crosspage posting capabilities of ASP.NET; another key improvement is the support for validation groups, in order to split the form in different validation islands, each one implementing its own, independent logic by means of validation controls.

The much-beloved forms authentication engine now supports cookieless scenarios, and the whole security system has been pushed forward and exposed by the brand new membership API, supported by a control bucket that automate the most common security-oriented tasks, such as: authentication, role based UI rendering and navigation and so on. Due to its intrinsic: plugged, object oriented architecture based upon the provider model, you will be able to implement your own API-compliant membership provider and still being able to use the control bucket.

The provider model is also the base foundation of the data source controls support, which emphasize the RAD experience allowing us to create pages that shows or modify data by means of a declarative model that do not require code writing; should you be worried about having to go back to the times when we had applications that mixed presentation and data access code, don't panic: the object data source control will allow you to declaratively take advantage of the improved data binding engine and controls reusing your existing business logic classes.

Whether you are already using ASP.NET v1.x, some other (and/or older) toolkit or even if you only developed windows applications, ASP.NET version 2 has a lot to offer to us developers, and is definitely worth a try.