Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 3. Application and Page Frameworks

If you are new to ASP.NET and building your first set of applications in ASP.NET 2.0, you may be amazed by all the wonderful new server controls it provides. You may marvel at how it enables you to work with data more effectively using the new data providers. You may be impressed at how easily you can build in security and personalization.

The outstanding capabilities of ASP.NET 2.0 don't end there, however. This chapter takes a look at many exciting additions that facilitate working with ASP.NET pages and applications. One of the first steps you, the developer, should take when starting a project is to become familiar with the foundation you are building on and the options available for customizing that foundation.

Application Location Options

With ASP.NET 2.0, you have the option—mdusing Visual Studio 2005—mdto create an application with a virtual directory mapped to IIS or a standalone application outside the confines of IIS. Whereas Visual Studio .NET forced developers to use IIS for all Web applications, Visual Studio 2005 (and Visual Web Developer Express Edition, for that matter) includes a built-in Web server that you can use for development, much like the one used in the past with the ASP.NET Web Matrix.

This built-in Web server was previously presented to developers as a code sample called Cassini. In fact, the code for this mini Web server is freely downloadable from the ASP.NET team Web site found at http://www.asp.net.

The following ...