You learn how to develop a rock-solid web portal applications that can withstand millions of hits every day while surviving scalability and security pressures - not just for mass-consumer homepages, but also for dashboards that provide powerful content aggregation for enterprises. Written by Omar AL Zabir, founder and CTO of Pageflakes, Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 demonstrates how to develop portals similar to My Yahoo, iGoogle, and Pageflakes using ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Workflow Foundation LINQ and. NET 3.5. Through the program book, AL Zabir build an open source Ajax-enabled portal prototype (available online at www.dropthings.com), and lead you though and architectural design challenges, advanced Ajax concepts, performance optimization techniques, and server-side scalability problems involved . You learn how to: Applying an architecture that is separated after the popular n-tier, widget-based application model provides the drag-and-drop, and use ASP.NET 3.5 to build the server-side web layer Use LINQ to build the data access layer, and Windows Workflow Foundation build the business layer as a collection of workflows Build client-side widgets using JavaScript for faster performance and better caching Get maximum performance from the ASP.NET AJAX Framework for faster, more dynamic, and scalable sites Build a custom web service call handler to overcome shortcomings in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 for asynchronous, transactional, cache-friendly web services Addressing JavaScript performance problems, and help the user interface load faster and be more responsive Solve scalability and security problems as your site grows from hundreds to millions of users Compiling and running the production volume high-site while solving software, hardware, hosting, and Internet infrastructure problems Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET ASP.NET 3.5 also presents real-world challenges that the author has solved in building educational and enterprise portals, plus thirteen production disasters common to web applications serving millions of users.