Well instead of studying I’ve lately become obsessed with ASP.Net and started reading the book named in the title! Although the book is written by a different author than the Pro C# 2008 and the .Net 3.5 Framework, the style is quite similar, and the quality is very high! I’m one of those weird freaks who tries to read books like these from the beginning to end as to learn all the tips and tricks contained in those 1500 pages.

I’m a bit surprised by the ordering of the chapters, of course allot of pages are dedicated to the ever important techniques for the DAL (data access layer). I’m a bit struck that authentication, security and log-ins/profiles are pushed back to the end of the book and complicated techniques like caching are in the first third of the book. (Btw I really love how ASP.Net makes caching easy!).

The authors explain everything brilliantly simple and there are allot of code examples (and a big plus here is that each code sample really provides you with a new technique or thought pattern, where the Pro C# book would some times have useless code examples). I’m also pretty sure that after reading this book you know how to write a good webpage. Many best practices are explained (in code and text) and each new technique starts with an overview of how was it done before. Of course every (new) technique has drawbacks or scenarios where it’s not the best tool for the job. Matthew MacDonald and Maria Szpuszta save you the time of weighting each technique by providing nice tables with pro’s and cons.

 

Anyway (not sure if I’ve told this in my Umbraco rant), I’ve started becoming interested in ASP.NET because Argeweb, in cooperation with Microsoft, provides all Dutch students entitled to SurfSpot a free .nl domain name and adequate Windows Server 2008 hosting (IIS7, ASP.NET.3.5, SQL Server 2005 and even PHP and MySQL support). So I’ve registered a nice domain name and started to joke around.

I sure hope I can show you guys something soon!

5 out of 5 stars :-)

Oh did I mention they also give a pretty thorough explanation of stored procedures, damn I had no idea you could do so much in DB code. The follow up to this article is a small stored procedure sample for inserting users only if they have a unique username and e-mail address without additional round trips.