ASP Live! Sessions
Five Management Essentials: 
Estimating, Scheduling, Planning, Tracking and Correction with VSTS
Martin Shoemaker, Richard Hale Shaw Group
Does your project use VB.NET or C#? Chances are, your customers don’t know and don’t care. Will your project be on time or late? Now that they care about! How much will it cost? When will it be done? These questions can be more trouble than the technology or languages you use; and they can also be the most important questions for your executives and your customers. This session will show team leads and team members how VSTS helps them in the three key resource management activities: estimating time and costs; planning and scheduling the effort; and tracking, reporting, and correcting as the project runs. Along the way, we’ll discuss some basic estimating, scheduling, and planning techniques.
Ajax-Style Development with ASP.NET 2.0
Vishwas Lele, Applied Information Sciences
AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) style Web applications are growing in popularity because of the demand for richer user experience in browsers. A number of high profile sites including Google maps and Gmail, as well as sites like A9 and Flickr are based on the AJAX-style. We’ll look at how ASP.NET 2.0 makes it easier to develop AJAX-style Web application using asynchronous callbacks. Learn how asynchronous callbacks are integrated into the ASP.NET HTTP Pipeline. We’ll also include code demos to illustrate how async callbacks can be integrated into a custom ASP.NET control.
Best Practices for Creating ReUsable Managed Code Libraries
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
How do you design good quality APIs and class libraries to run on the .NET Framework? Which type design principles are sound and which aren't? When should an operation be encapsulated as a method vs. a property, and when should it be virtual? How do you design for security and where do performance issues fit in? How should common Framework Patterns be implemented? Which interfaces should be implemented and collection types exposed and which should not? Which naming conventions work and why? In this session, we’ll explore the nature of good class library design. Find out how you can best leverage these ideas in your own libraries, errors to beware of, and how you can establish criteria for conventions your entire team can follow.
Attack and Defense: Securing ASP.NET 2.0 Applications
Keith Brown, Pluralsight
Building secure ASP.NET applications involves much more than calling security APIs. It takes careful design that considers threats and applies countermeasures that solve real problems. It takes a development team that knows how to write bulletproof code, with the foresight and funding to review that code and eradicate security flaws before they can be exploited. Ultimately, it takes education and a good process. This talk will introduce you to many resources: guidelines for threat modeling ASP.NET applications, how-tos for eliminating common security vulnerabilities, and many others. You’ll find that even a small shop can afford to build security into the software development lifecycle.
InfoCard: Ushering in the Identity Big Bang
Keith Brown, Pluralsight
Today there are several approaches to identity management under development, from grassroots efforts like LID all the way up to Goliaths like Liberty and Passport. Microsoft is building an infrastructure designed to allow all these technologies to work well together, giving the end user a simple, concrete way to consolidate and manage her online digital identities. This talk will tell the story of this "identity metasystem" code-named Info Card and one of the most exciting developments coming in Win FX. Come hear about the technology that could help usher in the Identity Big Bang and the next generation of the social Web.
Membership Features in ASP.NET 2.0
Chris Kinsman, Vergent Software
ASP.NET 2.0 provides a rich set of controls and the backend to allow no-code solutions to managing users and roles. In this session we will take a look at how ASP.NET 2.0 significantly reduces the effort on the part of the developer to add user or role based authentication to their code. Learn how to setup membership and roles, use the built-in controls and write code to interact with the membership APIs.
Inside ASP.NET 2.0 Security Features
Keith Brown, Pluralsight
In this talk, we'll drill down into a host of new features in ASP.NET 2.0 that make building secure web applications much easier than in the past. Some examples of what we'll cover include the new Http Only feature for cookies, web.config file encryption in single-server and Web farm configurations, and the Role provider model for role-based security. By understanding how these features work and the problems they were designed to solve, you'll be much better prepared to use them effectively to secure your own applications!
Tracking Users with the New Personalization Features in ASP.NET 2.0
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Although ASP.NET has always supported storing information about users in Session state, that information only persisted as long as the session was active. What if you need to save information about users of your site long term? You could create your own data access layer and business layer to handle this common need, but ASP.NET 2.0 makes this simple. Using the Profile class, you have strongly typed access to information that you define to keep track of users, either authenticated or anonymous. This session drills into using this new ASP.NET 2.0 feature which can save you hours of time for each site you build.
Implement “Rights-Based,” not “Role-Based” Security in .NET
Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day Consulting
The .NET security principal classes help you secure your application by checking if a user is a member of a “role”. For example, only members of “HR” role can view employee information. What if the requirements changed and now “HR” users can only view employee information for certain org units? A call to IsInRole() wouldn’t be enough because now you need the context of the org unit. Is this user a member of “HR” in the New York office?
The solution is a rights-based security model. Rights-based security extends the traditional role-based security with the granularity of context-relevant securable actions. In this session, we will discuss the essentials of developing a rights-based security model in .NET, how to develop your own I Principal classes, and how to tie a rights-based security framework into the ASP.NET 2.0 membership features using a custom membership provider.
Trick Bag: ASP.NET
Walt Ritscher, Scandiasoft
What’s in your Trick Bag? We all have them; those tips that you have learned during your career that help you build applications faster and smarter. This session shares some of my favorite ASP.NET tricks including: Page Head Injector: we’ll create a user control that can alter or insert text in the host page <head> tags. Default Buttons: Build a user control that tells the browser which button on the page is activated when the enter key is clicked. Phone Validator: Create a user control that validates and reformats phone numbers irregardless of how user inputs numbers. Add these tips and many more to your Trick Bag after attending this session.
Implementing .NET Object Mapping with N Hibernate
Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day Consulting
The problem: our applications use objects, but our databases don’t. Why isn’t there an easy way for applications to use objects, but store their contents in a database with a minimum of effort required to transition between them? Enter N Hibernate: an open-source, object-relational persistence framework that uses XML to map classes and properties (in your program) to tables and columns (in your database). Once you write the mappings, N Hibernate can generate the database code and SQL necessary to save and retrieve your objects. In this session, we’ll take a look at the fundamentals of using N Hibernate in an ASP.NET Web application, with applicability towards any scenario where objects should be transparently persisted.
Large Scale ASP.NET Rendering and Enterprise Control Development
Mark D'Urso, Microsoft
ASP.NET 2.0 has a variety of new features available for quickly creating robust Web sites. Master Pages allows HTML layout and server controls to be factored into a reusable set of components that can be recombined at runtime into device specific presentation modes. The Virtual Path Provider allows developers to hook in to the HTTP response life cycle in ways that were previously only available to ASP.NET itself. Join us for this talk and learn how MSDN and Tech Net have leveraged these and other technologies to create a scaleable, high performance Web site.
Best Kept Secrets in VS 2005 and .NET
Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
There are many new features in VS 2005, some of which have gotten great publicity (like generics) while others have been left lurking in the shadows. This session will shed some light on these lesser-known features to help you make the most of .NET 2.0. Did you know you could set Application-level events? That there is now a true global error handler? There is better way to manage connection strings? That you can now automatically retain user's settings? This session will cover these topics and much, much more.
Asynchronous Pages and Tasks in ASP.NET 2.0
Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
There is an alluring new attribute on the @Page directive in ASP.NET 2.0 called 'async'. Setting it to true means that you want to service that page on a different thread—and that's where the fun begins... This talk looks at when and where you might consider introducing asynchronous pages in your applications, and then how to subscribe to necessary delegates to perform work asynchronous to the request thread. We will cover various techniques for actually servicing requests in secondary threads, including the common scenario of making asynchronous Web service invocations from a page. This talk also covers the new asynchronous tasks introduced in 2.0, along with some compelling examples of combining these features with the new asynchronous features of ADO.NET 2.0.
Master Pages and Themes
Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
One of the most anticipated features coming in ASP.NET 2.0 is master pages. For years Web developers have struggled with a variety of techniques to 'templatize' their sites, none of which has proven to be a truly generic, reusable way of maintaining a standardized look and feel for an entire site. Master pages in ASP.NET 2.0 finally provide a sanctioned and elegant way of designing pages in an application based on a single template. This talk explores this new feature of ASP.NET 2.0 in detail, and looks at some best practice techniques for applying master pages to your sites. We will also look at the new themes feature in ASP.NET which gives you a convenient way of consolidating user interface elements of a site so that they can be easily modified or replaced.
Data Binding in ASP.NET 2.0
Andrew Brust, Citigate-Hudson
Sitting down? Good, because the data binding model in ASP.NET 2.0 has completely changed from the 1.X model. No longer are typed Data Sets sitting in the component tray (along with Data Adapters), your design time data source of choice. Now, a host of Data Source controls is being introduced, including a control that binds to objects. It’s out with the Data Grid and in with the Grid View, Details View, and Form View. Get the low-down on the new ASP.NET data binding paradigm, including how to handle data access in code with the new and improved ADO.NET 2.0.
Webcontrol Development Enhancements in ASP.NET 2.0
Miguel Castro, InfoTek Consulting Group, Inc.
ASP.NET 2.0 brought to the table many great enhancements to increase productivity in the development of Web applications. Additionally there are some incredible improvements to the infrastructure for developing custom server controls. As in ASP.NET 1.1, server controls/Webcontrols are not additions to ASP.NET's infrastructure; they are at the heart of its architecture. The development of custom Webcontrols has not been a technology embraced by all ASP.NET developers, but with the great new enhancements you'll learn here, maybe you too will get hooked. Learn about Templates, Smart Tags, Auto Formatting, Web Resources, and the AJAX-based Callbacks, and how easy it is to integrate all of this into Webcontrols of your own.
This presentation expects established knowledge of custom control development.
CSS for the ASP.NET Developer
Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Want to make your HTML efficient and easy to maintain? Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) are the answer. Many developers use an HTML Table structure to layout their data input pages. While this works it is not the most efficient, and not very flexible. Learn how to use CSS to build input pages that can change without modifying every page and every table in your ASPX pages.
