The evolution of ASP.NET continues! The progress from Active Server Pages 3.0 to ASP .NET 1.0 was revolutionary, and evolution from, ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0 is also dramatic and exciting. In this article we will try to run through some exciting new features that been included with the ASP.NET 2.0.
The introduction of ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 changed the web programming model and approach dramatically, but ASP.NET 2.0 also helps to increase productivity. The main objective of ASP.NET 2.0 is to enable you to build powerful, secure and dynamic web applications using the least possible amount of code.
In addition, ASP.NET 2.0 comes with a new, affordable tool for creating the websites, VISUAL WEB DEVELOPER EXPRESS. The earlier version of tools offered by Microsoft (FRONT PAGE) was clunky and never been popular (VISUAL INTERDEV). But this time things are been right. VISUAL WEB DEVELOPER is the part of Visual Studio Suite, but a limited version of the same, VWD Express, is been given by Microsoft for free. Both the versions of Visual Web Developer allows the developer to drag and drop a site together in few minutes, and also allows the developer to manage the site with ease.
Running or creating a web site created in ASP.NET 2.0 does not require IIS (Internet Information Server) to be present in the System. If you have a computer running Windows 2000 or later including Windows XP Home and Professional, running Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, you can create a professional and dynamic website in a jiffy in your file system only.
Another notable feature is that it is not required to create a project file.
To create a new web site, click New Web Site from the file menu. Or you can select Open Web Site (see Figure 1) dialog and then create or put the new web site in a folder and select open. After that Visual Studio creates a blank web site and does not create any files. From this anyone can go ahead and create his site.
Figure 1.: Creating a New Web Site
Another good feature about ASP.NET 2.0 is that it supports multiple languages in a single web site. This support is on file basis not on project basis. Means, that you can create one .aspx page in Visual Basic, another in C# and another in J# in the same web application (see Figure 2). You can also put the source code in separate code-behind page to avoid design code and source code to clutter up (see Figure 3).
Figure 2: Add New Item Dialogue Box
Figure 3: Code Management
This is most helpful when you have lots of code files and this helps when you to organize your source code and design code. But if you have lesser code or very small amount of code then you can put both the codes in same file as in the following code block:
<%@ Page Language="VB" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<script runat="server">
Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
Label1.Text = "Source Within the same file."
End Sub
</script>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Label" Width="216px"></asp:Label></div>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Code Block: VB Code within the Design Block
On addition of any new page, you will get the HTML view as well as the Design view. The HTML editor included with VWD, is more powerful and has full intellisense support to help you while typing your HTML code. Also in the new VWD you can preserve your arbitrary formatting.
Another great feature of Asp.NET 2.0 is that allow you to run the pages which have no error and see how they are actually looking like (see Figure 4). Earlier, if you had one error in any page in the application, the application would not run without the error being fixed.
Figure 4: Viewing the page
While coding you use lots of methods and functions and ASP.NET 2.0 has the new and improved Refactor. With the help of this you can easily pull out the code needed to put in a specific method. To do this you just select the piece of code and then right-click on it. Choose Refactor | Extract Method. When the dialog box for the method name pops up, type in the method name and click OK (see Figure 5 for an example of refactored code).
Figure 5: Example of Refactored Code
Now to improve the productivity ASP.NET 2.0 introduces the Master Pages. Master Pages are the templates which can be used as the foundation for numerous ASP.NET content pages. With this feature of Master Pages, the productivity has been increased and also makes it easier to manage ASP.NET 2.0 applications after they are built. As a developer you can put anything in the master page that you want to share throughout the application. This can include header, footer, navigation etc. which to be used across the entire application. The content page then contains all the page content except the master pages’ elements.
In past, as a web developer, we spent a lot of time including our own username and password system in the web application. Now with the introduction of ASP.NET 2.0, you don’t need to. Now ASP.NET 2.0 has it’s own built in username and password management system (see Figure 6) called membership along with bunch of UI controls which helps us managing the users, roles, user logins, password recovery for the user for our web application.
Figure 6: Built In Security Methods of ASP.NET 2.0
Before we can end this discussion on the new features of ASP.NET 2.0, I want to tell you about one more new feature. This new feature is called Web Parts. This new feature allows the user to personalize the site with their own custom layout. It also allows the user to edit the content of the web page according to his needs. Creating a web parts is easy and fun and is done by just Drag-and-Drop.