Visual Basic 2005, together with the .NET Framework, provides a wonderfully powerful development environment. With these tools, developers can build amazingly powerful applications relatively quickly and easily.

With this power, however, comes great complexity. Many books are available that discuss the Visual Basic language, and if you need to build a relatively simple application, those are generally sufficient. No books, however, address the complex issues that surround the development of more complicated Visual Basic applications. None discuss design, modeling, user-interface design, or testing for Visual Basic applications.

This book is intended for advanced Visual Basic programmers. It assumes that you already have experience with Visual Basic 2005 and are comfortable with the language. The book does not cover any language fundamentals, and does not include any refresher material. If you feel that you need more experience with Visual Basic, see my book Visual Basic 2005 Programmer’s Reference (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2005).

Delivering rich, Web 2.0-style experiences has never been easier. This book gives you a complete hands-on introduction to Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, the new framework that offers many of the same benefits for Ajax development that ASP.NET provides for server-side development. With Programming ASP.NET AJAX, you'll learn how to create professional, dynamic web pages with Ajax in no time.

Loaded with code and examples that demonstrate key aspects of the framework, this book is ideal not only for ASP.NET developers who want to take their applications a step further with Ajax, but for any web developers interested in ASP.NET AJAX, no matter what technology they use currently. That includes JavaScript programmers who would like to avoid the headaches of writing cross-browser code.

Programming ASP.NET AJAX offers you:

• A high-level overview of the ASP.NET AJAX framework
• Functional code that you can cut and paste for use in your own applications
• The essentials of JavaScript and Ajax to help you understand individual technologies used by the framework
• An organization that reflects the framework's packages, including Extensions, Control Toolkit, the Futures CTP, and the AJAX Library
• Sidebars throughout the book that identify and propose solutions to potential security breaches
• Ways to use the standards-based AJAX Library with other platforms, such as PHP
• A complete chapter on the UpdatePanel control for making individual parts of a web page independently updateable — one of the framework's most important elements

ASP.NET allows web sites to display unique pages for each visitor rather than show the same static HTML pages. The release of ASP.NET 2.0 is a revolutionary leap forward in the area of web application development. It brings with it a wealth of new and exciting built-in functions that reduce the amount of code you'll need to write for even the most common applications.

With more than 50 new server controls, the number of classes inside ASP.NET 2.0 has more than doubled, and in many cases, the changes in this new version are dramatic. This book will alert you to every new feature and capability that ASP.NET 2.0 provides so that you'll be prepared to put these new technologies into action. Greatly expanded from the original best-selling Professional ASP.NET 2.0, this new special edition adds hundreds of pages of new coverage of advanced and new techniques relating to data and data sources, the provider model, personalization, membership, role management, localization, configuration, migration, and Altas.

This book is for experienced programmers and developers who are looking to make the transition to ASP.NET 2.0.

If you think you're well versed in ASP.NET, think again. This exceptional guide gives you a master class in site building with this framework. You learn how to develop rock-solid web portal applications similar to My Yahoo!, iGoogle, and Pageflakes using ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Workflow Foundation, LINQ, and .NET 3.5, along with ASP.NET 3.5 — sites that can withstand millions of hits every day while surviving scalability and security pressures. 

If you think you're well versed in ASP.NET, think again. This exceptional guide gives you a master class in site building with ASP.NET 3.5 and other cutting-edge Microsoft technologies. You learn how to develop 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 deliver powerful content aggregation for enterprises.

Written by Omar AL Zabir, co-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 course of the book, AL Zabir builds an open source Ajax-enabled portal prototype (available online at www.dropthings.com), and walks you though the design and architectural challenges, advanced Ajax concepts, performance optimization techniques, and server-side scalability problems involved.

Dive deep into the internals of query tuning and optimization in SQL Server 2005 with this comprehensive reference. Understanding the internals of SQL Server helps database developers and administrators to better create, access, and effectively process information from enterprise data. Written by experts on SQL Server, this volume from the Inside Microsoft SQL Server series of books focuses on query tuning and optimization. You'll take an in-depth look at the best ways to make queries more efficient and effective, while maximizing existing resources. Includes extensive code samples and table examples to help database developers and administrators understand the intricacies and help promote mastery of query tuning and optimization.