Enhancements for ASP.NET 2.0

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ASP.NET is a programming structure built on the common language runtime. This structure can be used on a server to build powerful Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 improves upon the base of advantages by adding support for many new features in:

  • Developer Productivity

  • Administration and Management

  • Extensibility

  • Performance

The following gives an explanation on the enhancements.

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ASP.NET 2.0 encapsulates common Web tasks into application services and controls, which can be easily reused. With ASP.NET 2.0 you can reduce the code and concepts required for building common scenarios on the web.

Some of the services and controls are:

  • New Server Controls. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces over 50 new server controls that enable powerful declarative support for data access, login security, wizard navigation, menus, treeviews, portals, and more.

    Some of the new families of controls in ASP.NET 2.0 are:

    • Data Controls. Data access can be accomplished declaratively (no code) by using the new data-bound and data source controls.

    • Navigation Controls. The navigation controls provide common UI for navigation between pages in your site, such as treeviews, menus, and breadcrumbs.

    • Login Controls. The new login controls provide the base to add authentication and authorization-based UI to your site, such as login forms, create user forms, password retrieval, and custom UI for logged on users or roles.

    • Web Part Controls. Web parts is a new family of controls that helps you to add rich, personalized content and layout to your site, as well as the ability to edit that content and layout directly from your application pages.

  • Master Pages. This trait gives the ability to define common structure and interface elements for your site, such as a page header, footer, or navigation bar, in a common location called a “master page”, to be shared by many pages on your site. You can control the look, feel, and much of functionality in one place.

  • Themes and Skins. The themes and skins features help easy customization of your site’s look-and-feel. You can define style information in a common location called a “theme”, and apply that style information globally in your site.

  • Personalization. With the personalized services in ASP.NET 2.0 you can create customized experiences within Web applications. Personalized scenarios are now easier to build than ever before, and require considerably less code and effort to implement.

  • Localizaton. Enabling localization in Web sites is difficult but ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 give tools and infrastructure to build localizable site, including the ability to auto-detect incoming locales and display the appropriate locale based UI.

Deployment and maintenance in a production environment is a key component of an application’s lifetime. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces several new features that enhance the deployment, management, and operations of ASP.NET servers.

  • Configuration API. ASP.NET 2.0 has new configuration management APIs, helping users to program and build programs or scripts that create, read, and update Web.config and machine.config configuration files.

  • ASP.NET MMC Admin Tool. ASP.NET 2.0 gives a complete administration tool that plugs into the existing IIS Administration MMC, helping an administrator to read or change any setting within your XML configuration files.

  • Pre-compilation Tool. ASP.NET 2.0 gives an application deployment utility that helps both developers and administrators to precompile a dynamic ASP.NET application before deployment.

  • Health Monitoring and Tracing. ASP.NET 2.0 gives health-monitoring support to allow administrators to be automatically notified when an application on a server starts experiencing problems.

ASP.NET 2.0 is a well-factored and open system, where any component can be replaced with a custom implementation. Developers can plug in custom code anywhere in the page lifecycle to further customize ASP.NET 2.0 to their needs.

  • Provider-driven Application Services. ASP.NET 2.0 contains built-in support for membership (user name/password credential storage) and role management services out of the box. With this you have complete control over the data store and schema that drives these rich application services.

  • Control Extensibility Server. ASP.NET 2.0 contains better support for control extensibility, such as more base classes that encapsulate common behaviors, improved designer support, more APIs for interacting with client-side script, metadata-driven support for new features like themes and accessibility verification, better state management, and more.

  • Data Source Controls. Data access in ASP.NET 2.0 is performed declaratively using data source controls on a page. The SqlDataSource control that ships in the box has built-in support for any ADO.NET managed provider that implements the new provider factory model in ADO.NET.

  • Compilation Build Providers. Dynamic compilation in ASP.NET 2.0 is handled by wide compilation build provider, which links a particular file extension with a handler that knows how to compile that extension dynamically at runtime. It is easy to add support for additional extensions by implementing a custom build provider and registering it in Web.config.

  • Expression Handlers. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a declarative new syntax for referencing code, to alternate values into the page, called Expression Handlers. ASP.NET 2.0 includes Expression Handlers for referencing string resources for localization, connection strings, application settings, and profile values.

ASP.NET is built to perform, using a compiled execution model for handling page requests and running on the world’s fastest web server, Internet Information Services. ASP.NET 2.0 also introduces key performance benefits over previous versions.

  • 64-Bit Support. ASP.NET 2.0 is now 64-bit enabled, meaning it can make use of full memory address space of new 64-bit processors and servers. Developers can simply copy existing 32-bit ASP.NET applications onto a 64-bit ASP.NET 2.0 server and have them automatically JIT compiled and executed as native 64-bit applications (no source code changes or manual re-compile are required).

  • Caching Improvements. ASP.NET 2.0 also includes automatic database server cache invalidation. This feature allows developers to insistently output a cache database-driven page and a partial page content on a site. ASP.NET can automatically invalidate these cache entries and refresh the content whenever the back-end database changes.

The remainder of the QuickStart presents practical examples of these and other features in ASP.NET.

From:Microsoft

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