ASP.NET Web Developer's Guide

By Mesbah Ahmed, Chris Garrett, Jeremy Faircloth, and Chris Payne

Since 1996, ASP programmers have faced one upgrade after another, often with no extremely visible advantages until version 3.x—it’s been quite a wild ride. Now we have the first significant improvement in ASP programming within our grasp —ASP.NET. Our reliance on a watered-down version of Visual Basic has been alleviated now that ASP.NET pages may be programmed in both Microsoft’s new and more powerful version of Visual Basic or the latest version of C++: C#, which is more Web friendly.ASP.NET allows programmers and developers to work with both VB.NET and C# within the same ASP.NET page. .NET itself is a milestone for Microsoft; it marks Microsoft’s entry into the “run once, run everywhere” compiler market alongside Java and Ruby. .NET is also notable for its extreme flexibility; unlike the other choices available, .NET allows the programmer to use any number of .NET-compliant languages to create its code (however, as of this writing, only VB.NET and C# are allowed for ASP.NET) and have it run anywhere through the robust .NET Framework.Visual Basic and C++ have undergone changes as well; Visual Basic was already somewhat Web-oriented through its sibling,Visual Basic Script (VBS).

Since VBS was not visually orientated, like Visual Basic, this meant that a lot of the prewritten code employed by Visual Basic did not create performance issues.This did mean, however, that VBS was not graced with an IDE to debug or troubleshoot with, making the server logs and the browser error messages a programmer’s only hope of figuring out what went wrong and where.The lack of an IDE led to several complications and eventually programmers had to create their own error-handling system, usually consisting of a log file and e-mail notification.

VBS had another obstacle to overcome in attempting to offer programmers more than what originally was basically a scaled-down version of Visual Basic.VBS lacked many of Visual Basic’s strong features due to the way that the IIS was limited at the time, especially with object creation and cleanup. Programmers experienced code or objects locking up before destruction, rampant memory leaks, and even buffer overflows that were caused by IIS, not by the code itself.

With .NET in general,Visual Basic and VBS are now one and the same. All of the Web-oriented abilities of VBS have been given to Visual Basic and it has received a significant retooling of the language and syntax. Many previous problems, such as poor memory management and object control, have been resolved by the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and internal programming additions, such as the inclusion of the Try/Catch error-handling system and more low-level abilities than before. All in all,Visual Basic can now be called a true programming language.

C++ retained all the aspects that made it a powerful programming language, such as its excellent object control and error-handling techniques, in its new version, C#. It has now gained a very good IDE as well as being more Web-based, a trait that can be attributed to the .NET Framework and ASP.NET. It is expected that many programmers will still use C# for object control while combining it with Visual Basic’s ease of use for GUI and presentation.

This book is meant to show all ASP programmers, new and old, just how powerful ASP.NET now is. Unlike ASP 1.x through 3.x, which worked in Windows 95 through the Personal Web Server tool, you will need at least Windows 2000, all the latest service packs, Internet Explorer 6, IIS 5.x (up to date), and the .NET SDK installed. As of this writing, the latest version of .NET is Beta 2, which covers the framework,ASP, and its programming languages. Remember, this book is meant to be an introduction to ASP.NET, not VB.NET or C#. If you need a good book on VB.NET or C#, I recommend looking to two other books published by Syngress Publishing: The VB.NET Developer’s Guide (ISBN 1-928994-48-2) and The C#.NET Web Developer’s Guide (ISBN 1-928994-50-4).

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COM and .NET Interoperability

By Andrew Troelsen

The funny thing about writing a book on COM and .NET interoperability is that one author could craft a five- to ten-page article describing the basic details that you must understand to get up and running with interop-related endeavors. At the same time, another author could write volumes of material on the exact same subject. So, you may be asking, how could this massive discrepancy between authors possibly exist?

Well, stop and think for a moment about the number of COM-aware programming languages and COM application frameworks that exist. Raw C++/IDL, ATL, MFC, VB 6.0, and Object Pascal (Delphi) each have their own syntactic tokens that hide the underbelly of COM from view in various ways. Thus, the first dilemma you face as an interop author is choosing which language to use to build the COM sample applications.

Next, ponder the number of .NET-aware programming languages that are either currently supported or under development. C#, VB .NET, COBOL .NET, APL .NET, PASCAL .NET, and so on, each have their own unique ways of exposing features of the CTS to the software engineer. Therefore, the next dilemma is choosing which language to use to build the .NET applications.

Even when you solve the first two dilemmas and choose the languages to use during the course of the book, the final dilemma has to do with the assumptions made regarding the readers themselves. Do they have a solid understanding of IDL and the COM type system? Do they have a solid understanding of the .NET platform, managed languages, and metadata? If not, how much time should be spend pounding out such details?

Given the insane combinations of language preferences and reader backgrounds, I have chosen to take a solid stance in the middle ground. If I have done my job correctly, you will walk away from this text with the skills you need to tackle any interop-centric challenge you may encounter. Also, I am almost certain you will learn various tantalizing tidbits regarding the COM and .NET type systems.

My ultimate goal in writing this book is to provide you with a solid foundation of COM and .NET interoperability. To achieve this goal, I have chosen to provide material that defines the finer details of the COM and .NET architectures. For example, over the course of the first six chapters, you will learn how to programmatically generate and parse COM IDL, dynamically generate C# and VB .NET source code on the fly (via System.CodeDOM), and build .NET applications that can read COM type information. After all, when you need to build a software solution that makes use of two entirely unique programming paradigms, you had better have a solid understanding of each entity.

However, once this basic foundation has been laid, the bulk of this book describes the process of making COM and .NET binaries coexist in harmony. As an added bonus, I cover the process of building .NET code libraries that can leverage the services provided by the COM+ runtime layer (via System.EnterpriseServices).

COM and .NET Interoperability

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

By J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, and Alex Mackman

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability provides an approach to engineering applications for performance and scalability.

This guide provides a principle-based approach for engineering performance and scalability throughout your application life cycle.

The guidance is task-based and presented in parts that correspond to life cycles, tasks, and roles. It is designed to be used as a reference or be read from beginning to end, and is divided into five parts:

• Part I, "Introduction to Engineering for Performance," outlines how to apply performance considerations throughout your application life cycle.
• Part II, "Designing for Performance," gives you an approach for architecting and designing for performance, using performance modeling. The design guidelines in this part include a set of guiding principles and technology-agnostic practices.
• Part III, "Application Performance and Scalability," provides deep platform knowledge across the Microsoft® .NET Framework technologies.
• Part IV, "Database Server Performance and Scalability," presents a consolidation of the most important techniques for improving database performance.
• Part V, "Measuring, Testing, and Tuning," provides a process, tools, and techniques for evaluating performance and scalability.

This .Net guide is valuable for anyone who cares about application performance objectives. It is designed to be used by technologists from many different disciplines, including architects, developers, testers, performance analysts, and administrators. The guidance is task-based, and is presented in parts that correspond to the various stages of the application life cycle and to the people and roles involved during the life cycle.

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An Introduction to ASP .NET using Visual Basic .NET

By Peter McMahon

This book is aimed primarily at three groups of people. First, those readers who are Visual Basic programmers and wish to learn how to develop Web applications using ASP.NET by applying what they’ve learned in Visual Basic. = Second, current ASP programmers who wish to learn how to become more productive using the completely new, yet familiar, ASP.NET programming model and the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Third, current ASP and Visual Basic programmers who wish to merge their skills to increase their productivity.

This book assumes no previous knowledge of building Web applications or even simple, static Web pages using hand-coded HTML. There is a chapter dedicated to getting Visual Basic programmers without any HTML or Web building knowledge up to speed. However, this book does assume previous experience with the Visual Basic programming language or a previous subset thereof, VBScript. Included is a section showing the differences between VBScript (and previous versions of Visual Basic) and the Visual Basic .NET language that should prevent some of the subtleties of the language from causing any problems. Knowledge of object-oriented programming is advantageous, although not essential.

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