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ASP.NET 2.0 MVP Hacks Review by David Wier
Want to expand your development skills?
With the word 'Hacks' in the title, this may throw a few people a 'curve' ball, as it were. As explained inside the
well-known Wiley (Wrox) red covers, some people call them 'creative solutions'. Some people call them
Tips and Tricks. In this writer's opinion, 'Creative Solutions' is a much
better name for what's inside. The code explained starts by showing how v2.0 of ASP.Net took some of the 'hacks' or
'creative solutions' for 1.1 and incorporated the obvious needs inside v2.0. Then, the writers take what's given
in v2.0, and extend that much further, finding the 'shortcomings' and extending the possibilities much further.
A few pages in the beginning, along with an entire chapter (16) deals with Master Pages, one of the more colossal
additions to ASP.Net 2.0, and rightly so, having its origins in Paul Wilsons Template pages, back in the 1.x days. Again,
this book takes a quick look at how to build Master pages, along with Content pages, and then shows how to extend
and nest them. But, then, this is only a start.
When reading this book we are taken through the steps of adding client side scripting to GridViews (and much more),
creating your own RSS viewer control, through Cache, Viewstate, Security and Deployment hacks/tips, and finally ends up with HTTP Handlers and Modules.
This book is not a beginner's book, by any means, but it can take an intermediate or even advanced
developer and really help him/her get to the next 'level'. Looking back, it's just as much as an 'eye-opener' type of book. Yes, it shows code and explains how to do a whole lot of new programming, but just as much, it expands your horizons, enabling you to not only see those horizons, but realize then, how to get past them.
If I were to find one fault with the book, it would be that 90% of the code samples in the book are with C#. There are a few
VB.Net samples sprinkled here and there, but coming from a VB.Net development background, I did find this a shortcoming.
However, if that's all that I could find as a 'con', the 'pros' far outweigh them.