Below I give a short description about all 17 chapters of
this book.
Hacks Revisited
The first chapter tries to give some famous common ASP.NET
1.1 hacks that are now a part of ASP.NET 2.0 because Microsoft could get their
importance from community. Some hacks such as ASP.NET Wizard Control, Master
Pages and URL Rewriting are briefly described with their history.
Getting Started
The second chapter talks about one of the common topics for
every developer from a professional point of view. The main goal of this
chapter is to give good information and tips about building projects,
organizing them, database projects, working with source control, setting up a
custom base page class, using Master Pages, dealing with ASP.NET 2.0 themes and
skins, how to deal with Web Configurations in a team and working with Visual
Studio 2005 Templates.
The Power of Providers
This chapter starts with giving some information about
provider model, ASP.NET 2.0 built-in providers and how to extend them. Then it
shows you how to write your own Membership and Role providers, as well as
building a Role Provider Proxy. This chapter ends by talking about building a
custom provider.
The Smarter Web Client
This chapter discusses AJAX and Atlas.
After starting with Client Callback feature in ASP.NET 2.0 in some detail and how it can enable AJAX functionality for developers by giving an example of
its implementation in a custom control, the chapter talks about Atlas, how it
works and some common Atlas controls such as AutoComplete, UpdatePanel and
TimerControl shortly. Finally, a list of community projects for AJAX has been presented.
Debugging What You Created
The authors begin this chapter by talking about Visualizers
and their role in .NET debugging and how to write your own Visualizer and
deploy it. To do this they provide a real world example of creating an Image
Visualizer.
The last pages of this chapter are dedicated to talking
about some coding tips for better debugging, such as setting object member
visibility, Type Proxy and add debugging logic to business objects.
Control Hacks
This chapter discusses some hacks around controls. To do
this the authors have chosen ASP.NET XML server control to extend it to enable
RSS functionality for it and show some tips to readers.
During this process some topics such as caching, custom type
converters, custom actions and designers, design time and design type editor
have been covered.
GridView Hacks
Chapter 7 is all about GridView control to show you how to
enable extra functionality for your GridView controls by using several server
and client side tips.
Some hacks that are included in this chapter are dynamically
expanded rows on client side, creating a pager template for GridView control,
deleting selected rows in GridView, updating all GridView rows using batch
query, adding a selected row, using up and down arrows in column headers to
sort rows, use client side scripts for this control for better functionality
and IPostBackEventHandler to extend GridView functionality.
This chapter contains several useful hacks about GridView
control.
Extreme Data Binding
The main goal of this chapter is ASP.NET 2.0 DataSource
controls and covers the following topics: inheriting your own DataSource
control, working with DataSource configuration wizard to add your custom
DataSource, adding a control designer for your DataSource control, extending
DataSource controls and working with and extending custom parameters and
fields.
As with chapter 7, this chapter has very good hacks for
developers.
View State
This chapter starts with giving background about ViewState
and its role in the page's life cycle and how to use LosFormatter to serialize
data to save in ViewState. This chapter follows with talking about a technique
to split ViewState in ASP.NET 1.1 and compressing ViewState for a smaller
size. The chapter ends by discussing alternative storage options for ViewState
and moving ViewState to the bottom of the page for better SEO friendly output.
Cache Hacks
Caching is important enough to have its own chapter in the
book. Chapter 10 talks about static caching, reading and modifying the cache
and refreshing the cache. It follows with writing a sample ASP.NET cache
viewer to show how a developer can view the cache via code. This sample can be
considered the best part of this chapter.
Moving to ASP.NET 2.0 from 1.x
To do a migration from ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0 there is a
built-in wizard in Visual Studio 2005, but it cannot handle all scenarios. Professional
developers need to do more for their applications.
This chapter starts by creating a demo ASP.NET 1.x web
application which contains some user controls, classes and pages. The authors
then give a bit of information about the migration process and implement a
migration for this demo application. They finish this chapter by discussing
some common topics around conversion and the issues that may be raised during it.
Deployment Hacks
Deployment is another important topic in each software
system and ASP.NET web applications are no exceptions. ASP.NET 2.0 comes with
several new deployment options and developers should understand them to be able
to choose the best one for their needs.
This chapter gives some information about Copy Web Site
wizard, Publish Web Site wizard and Windows installer. Later it discusses Web
Deployment Project Add-in and some compilation and assembly tips. It ends with
a short description of MSBuild and what a developer can do with it.
Leveraging Visual Studio
Visual Studio is the most common IDE for writing ASP.NET
applications and there are many hacks and tips available for it.
Code Snippets, their description and applications and a way
to make snippets are the first topics covered in chapter 13. At the end of the
chapter Visual Studio Templates are introduced and discussed.
Security Hacks
This important topic is the main goal of this chapter. Some
techniques to avoid SQL Injection and Parameterizing IN Expression are the
database related security hacks at the start of this chapter.
The chapter follows with some hacks for protecting against
Canonicalization Attacks, ASP.NET 2.0 File Upload server control, Dynamic
Impersonation and Validating a strong password in Login control.
Building Your Own Hacks
The authors want to help other developers build their own
hacks and encourage them to publish them on .NET communities.
After giving a definition of a hack and some constraints to
help consider a hack, the authors talk about several techniques to build your
own hacks and refer you to some famous .NET communities to publish them.
Master Pages
No! This chapter does not talk about Master Pages in
details. It just introduces them with some fundamentals about the necessity
for their existence, such as the functionality in older platforms and how to
deal with them via code. It then talks about nested Master Pages and some tips
to load them in Visual Studio IDE. Sharing a Master Page across multiple IIS
application is another topic of this chapter. The last topic is about
dynamically adding a Master Page to a content page.
Handlers and Modules
Scott Hanselman is the author of this chapter. He does not
show how you can write an HTTPModule or HTTPHandler in ASP.NET. Instead, he
shows you some examples of real world scenarios that can be implemented via
them.
An IP Blacklist HTTPModule, Rewriting and Redirecting URLs
with an HTTPModule, Boilerplate HTTPHandler, Discouraging Leeching using an
Image-Specific HTTPHandler, Compositing Images with an HTTPHandler and
Generating Sparklines with an HTTPHandler are the main topics of the last
chapter.
This great book ends with introducing ELMAH (Error Logging
Modules and Handlers) which is a good example of working with a combination of
HTTPModules and HTTPHandlers together.
