Overview

The Microsoft® Expression Web Developer's Guide to ASP.NET 3.5

Expression Web introduced ASP.NET to a new group of web developers. This book is designed to help you start using ASP.NET right away to add powerful new features to your website. Don't worry, you won't have to learn a lot of programming; instead, you'll create an ASP.NET application from start to finish using Visual Web Developer 2008, while writing only a very small amount of actual programming code.

DETAILED INFORMATION ON HOW TO…

     •    Create and work with websites in Visual Web Developer 2008
     •    Use the different compilation and code models in ASP.NET
     •    Configure ASP.NET security and other settings
     •    Use ASP.NET master pages and user controls
     •    Take advantage of ASP.NET membership features for a password-protected website
     •    Use form validation in ASP.NET
     •    Use CSS, skins, and themes
     •    Access, edit, and add data to a database using ASP.NET
     •    Send email using ASP.NET
     •    Use Ajax and ASP.NET Web services
     •    Debug and troubleshoot ASP.NET
          . . . and much more!

Jim Cheshire is the author of several books, including Special Edition Using Microsoft Expression Web. He has been working with ASP.NET since before its release. He has been heavily involved in the web design community for more than a decade and is widely considered an expert in Microsoft's web design technologies. Jim currently works as an escalation engineer on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft.

Web design is no longer simply about designing attractive Web pages that link to each other. Dynamic content, user collaboration, database integration, diverse content management, and server- and client-side scripting make up a world that can't be contained on a simple Web page or site. Web pages, sites, and users all communicate with each other in ways few could have guessed afew years back. Microsoft obviously had some ideas about where things were heading with its .NET focus and the integration of Expression Web with Windows SharePoint Services, the server technology considered by Microsoft to be the future of Web content. With the release of Expression Web, the product was positioned to work with all these elements integrating tightly with the best Microsoft has to offer. This book is for those web designers who are building standards-based XHTML Web sites and applications and it provides information so that professional designers can take advantage of the best of dynamic Web-site design, which will enable users to develop web applications. Readers will learn how to create standards-compliant websites with Expression Web that will work consistently in all browsers.

Who Should Read This Book?

Expression Web 2 is a powerful Web development product, and there are plenty of books about it. That puts readers in a tight spot when trying to figure out which book to purchase to learn how to use Expression Web 2 to its fullest. I've read a lot of technical books in my career, and the ones that I find most helpful are the ones that teach me everything about a particular product instead of only teaching me the features and techniques that the author prefers. If that's the kind of book you appreciate, then this is the book for you.

I have also found that many technical books are frustratingly light on any meaningful content. In fact, most of them are just complex rewrites of the documentation that ships with the product. I get the documentation with the product, and I'd rather not pay for it again from a third party. Instead, I want a book that tells me what the documentation doesn't tell me.

That's exactly what this book will do. It will show you how to use the features in Expression Web 2 for real-world Web design. I'll give you pointers on how to effectively use several features together to achieve a common goal. I'll give you a strong foundation in the technologies involved (for example, Cascading Style Sheets [CSS], Extensible Hypertext Markup Language [XHTML], ASP.NET, PHP, and more) so you aren't working in a vacuum.

When the first edition of this book was released, I read plenty of quotes from people saying that, because it is comprehensive and covers all features in Expression Web, it was best for advanced users. I agree that this book is a great resource for advanced users, but it also is great for users new to Expression Web 2. If you want a book that will continue to provide you with valuable information as your knowledge of Expression Web 2 and Web design grows, this book is a great choice for you.

The goal of this book is to equip you to be a better Web designer using Expression Web 2 as one of the tools in your arsenal. If that sounds like something you're interested in, keep reading!

The old 80/20 rule for software—that 80% of a program’s users use only 20% of a program’s features— doesn’t apply to Microsoft Excel. Instead, this program probably operates under what could be called the 95/5 rule: Ninety-five percent of Excel users use a mere 5% of the program’s power. On the other hand, most people know that they could be getting more out of Excel if they could only get a leg up on building formulas and using functions. Unfortunately, this side of Excel appears complex and intimidating to the uninitiated, shrouded as it is in the mysteries of mathematics, finance, and impenetrable spreadsheet jargon.

If this sounds like the situation you find yourself in, and if you’re a businessperson who needs to use Excel as an everyday part of your job, you’ve come to the right book. In Formulas and Functions with Microsoft Excel 2007, I demystify the building of worksheet formulas and present the most useful of Excel’s many functions in an accessible, jargon-free way. This book not only takes you through Excel’s intermediate and advanced formula-building features, but it also tells you why these features are useful to you and shows you how to use them in everyday situations and real-world models. This book does all this with no-nonsense, step-by-step tutorials and lots of practical, useful examples aimed directly at business users.

Even if you’ve never been able to get Excel to do much beyond storing data and adding a couple of numbers, you’ll find this book to your liking. I show you how to build useful, powerful formulas from the ground up, so no experience with Excel formulas and functions is necessary.

Introduction

Visual Basic for Applications is a mouthful to say (which is why I’ll use the standard short form—VBA—from now on), but it also seems like it would be a real handful to learn. After all, this is a programming language we’re talking about, right?

True, but VBA was designed to be easy to learn and straightforward to apply. I’ve learned a couple of dozen programming languages over the past 30 years or so, and I can tell you that VBA is, hands down, the easiest language I’ve ever worked with.

Okay, but isn’t this stuff just for power users and the staff of the Information Technology department?

Yes, VBA is a useful tool for hardcore users and those who need to design major projects. But VBA can be immensely useful for every user. As a writer, I use Word constantly, and over the years I’ve developed dozens of small macros, functions, and forms that streamline or automate repetitive chores. Most of these routines consist of only a few lines of code, and each one saves me only about 30 seconds to a minute, depending on the task. But I use these routines 50 or 100 times a day, so I end up saving myself anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes a day! That’s pretty remarkable, but the proof is in the pudding: I can now write far more pages in a day than I used to. (Don’t tell my editor!)