ASP.NET 2.0: Introduction for Beginners

Course Overview

Build effective ASP.NET 2 web applications using Visual Studio 2005. This course will provides you with the necessary skills and techniques to design and write web applications using ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft's framework for building scalable, robust and secure Web applications. You will gain in-depth technical knowledge of ASP.NET and its related technologies and obtain practical insights into developing enterprise-scale, data-driven Web applications. This will lead to an appreciation of the "plumbing" that is supplied by ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005, leading to significant increases in your productivity. Throughout the course you will be building a fully functional ASP.NET 2.0 web solution, using best practices including writing secure code to protect against potential malicious attacks. Instructions and solutions are provided in both C# 2.0 and Visual Basic 2005, enabling you to work with your choice of language.

Audience

Developers who want to create real-world Internet and Intranet applications using Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0. This course is also suitable for developers moving from Visual Basic or ASP. Existing ASP.NET 1.x developers should attend the Upgrade Skills to ASP.NET 2.0 course.

Prerequisites

Delegates should have basic knowledge of HTML and web page creation. These skills can be obtained by attending QA's Building an Effective Web Site course. Delegates should have an existing knowledge of a .NET programming language or be experienced developers with another Object Orientated language. Delegates without these skills would benefit from attending a .NET programming language course.

Course Outline

Fundamentals

• The HTTP protocol
• Cookies
• Form processing
• HTML form elements review
• Internet Information Server
• Virtual directories
• Configuring your ASP.NET application
• The ASP.NET processing model
• ASP.NET page execution
• The event lifecycle

Using Visual Studio 2005

• Creating File and HTTP based Web sites
• Project-less development
• The ASP.NET folder structure
• Essential features of the editors and the IDE
• Understanding the code separation model
• The Visual Web Developer Web Server
• Copying and Publishing your site

Designing your web site

• CSS review
• The stylesheet designer
• HTML layouts: tables, floats, CSS positioning
• Creating common layout with Master pages
• Content placeholders
• Content pages
• Themes and skins
• Multiple skins
• StylesheetThemes
• Applying themes programmatically

Validation and Error handling

• The need for validation
• Validation on the client and server
• The ASP.NET validation controls
• Exception handling
• Page Error event
• Application Error
• Custom error pages

Site navigation

• Navigation scenarios
• Basic navigation in ASP.NET
• Alternative navigation mechanisms
• Cross page postbacks
• Accessing the previous page
• Creating wizards
• Templating wizards
• The navigation API
• The Web.sitemap file
• Menus
• Treeviews
• Breadcrumbs

User controls and Web parts

• Building common page parts with user controls
• Encapsulation and user controls
• What are Web parts
• Web part infrastructure
• Creating Web parts
• Styling Web parts
• Supporting customisation of layout
• Editor parts
• Catalog parts
• Personalization providers

Components and architecture

• Architecture considerations
• Component based development
• General data access issues: locking, scalability, performance

Data access and presentation

• Using the ASP.NET 2.0 data source controls
• GridView, FormView and DetailsView
• Examine custom binding strategies

ADO.NET and XML

• The ADO.NET managed providers
• DataSets and DataAdapters
• DataReader
• Configuring ASP.NET applications to use ADO.NET

Caching

• The Cache API
• Using Cache dependencies
• SqlCacheDependency objects
• Notifcation and polling mechanisms
• The OutputCache directive
• User control caching
• The substitution control

State management

• State considerations
• State scenarios
• Maintaining state across postbacks
• Securing ViewState
• Maintaining state between pages
• Maintaining state across all pages
• Session performance and robustness
• Cookieless sessions
• Persisting state between sessions
• Declaring and using Profile state
• Anonymous identification

Securing access to Web applications

• Security issues
• IIS authentication/authorisation
• ASP.NET authentication/authorisation
• Principals, Identities and Roles
• ASP.NET authentication options
• ASP.NET authorisation options
• Forms authentication
• Using the Membership and Role system
• The login controls
• Code-based checks

"You've been hacked"

• Understanding and modelling threats
• Cross-site scripting
• SQL injection
• Replay attacks
• Query string, form variable and cookie vulnerabilities
• Session hijacking
• Tips for hardening your application

Under the covers

• Extending the pipeline with custom modules and handlers
• URL re-writing
• The health monitoring API
• Web events
• Heartbeat events
• Creating custom events

AJAX

• What is AJAX?
• AJAX infrastructure
• Steps for creating client-callbacks
• Processing the request server-side
• Processing the response client-side
• ATLAS

Web services

• Service oriented architecture
• The role of Web services
• Writing Web services with ASP.NET
• Using a Web service from your application
• Asynchronous page processing

ASP.NET 2.0: Introduction for Beginners / MDNA2-I5