ASP.NET introduces many new features for web application development. It promises a wealth of benefits including higher performance, pain free multi-device development, and easier code reuse. This book will show you what is possible and give you an understanding of ASP.NET that you will find invaluable as you go on to develop cutting edge applications.

This book takes a top-down approach to describing and explaining ASP.NET. We start off by looking at what an ASP.NET application actually consists of. We then focus on the most fundamental component of web applications - the pages. After explaining how ASP.NET pages are constructed, we look at the controls that the pages contain. We introduce the range of controls that ASP.NET provides and show how to populate them with data from a variety of data sources.

The security framework provided by ASP.NET is examined along with discussion of how it helps us to implement authentication and authorization. The features that ASP.NET includes for building SOAP based web services are also covered.