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ASP.NET 2.0 is the latest version of Microsoft's revolutionary ASP.NET technology. It is the principal standard for creating dynamic web pages on the Windows platform. ASP.NET 2.0 boasts a range of important new features that make it superior to any Windows web-presentation technology that has come before it. A few of these are:

Masterpages let you define your site's look and feel once and apply it across all your web forms.
Themes and skins make for easy customization of your site's look and feel. Generics these much vaunted new additions to the .NET Framework allow you to create a data structure without committing to a specific data type — they'll revolutionize the way you code
Personalization — ASP.NET 2.0 makes it easier than ever before to create customized experiences tailored for individual users.

These, combined with improvements in everything from speed (ASP.NET 2.0 pages are faster to both write and serve), administration , data access, security and scalability make ASP.NET 2.0 the leading force in .NET web development.

Seasoned .NET professionals Matthew MacDonald and Mario Szpuszta explain how you can get the most from this ground-breaking new technology. They cover ASP.NET 2.0 as a whole, illustrating both the brand-new features and the functionality carried over from previous versions of ASP. This book will give you the knowledge you need to code real ASP.NET 2.0 application in the best possible style.

The book will teach you ASP.NET 2.0 in five clear steps. You will learn:

Core concepts of ASP.NET 2.0. Why it's special. What its fundamental principals are. The basics of Visual Studio. How ASP.NET 2.0 controls are created, and how they fit into ASP.NET 2.0 pages, ultimately creating full applications
Data access details. The intricacies of ADO.NET 2.0 and how to perform data binding to many sources — from databases, to file-streams, to XML
Security. Once considered the Achilles heel of all Windows web applications, security has been completely revamped in ASP.NET 2.0. This section explains the various forms of available security, and how to best apply them
Taking things further using Advanced User Interface Techniques. This includes User Controls, Customer Server Controls, client-side JavaScript and GDI+. This is where the real strength of ASP.NET 2.0 lies
Web Services. In an increasingly connected world, working with web services grows in importance. This book will show you how to work with them