Additional New Features of ASP.NET 2.0

Additional New Features of ASP.NET 2.0

You just learned some of the main goals of the ASP.NET team that built ASP.NET 2.0. To achieve these

goals, the team built a mountain of new features into ASP.NET. A few of them are described in the fol-

lowing sections.

New Developer Infrastructures

An exciting advancement in ASP.NET 2.0 is that new infrastructures are in place for you to use in your

applications. The ASP.NET team selected some of the most common programming operations performed

with ASP.NET 1.0 to be built directly into ASP.NET. This saves you considerable time and coding.

Membership and Role Management

In earlier versions, if you were developing a portal that required users to log in to the application to gain

privileged access, invariably you had to create it yourself. It can be tricky to create applications with

areas that are accessible only to select individuals.

Personalization

One advanced feature that portals love to offer their membership base is the capability to personalize

their offerings so that end users can make the site look and function however they want. The capability

to personalize an application and store the personalization settings is now completely built into the

ASP.NET framework.

Because personalization usually revolves around a user and possibly a role that this user participates in,

the personalization architecture can be closely tied to the membership and role infrastructures. You have

a couple of options for storing the created personalization settings. The capability to store these settings

in either Microsoft Access or in SQL Server is built into ASP.NET 2.0. As with the capabilities of the

membership and role APIs, you can use the flexible provider model, and then either change how the

built-in provider uses the available data store or build your own custom data provider to work with a

completely new data store. The personalization API also supports a union of data stores, meaning that

you can use more than one data store if you want.

Because it is so easy to create a site for customization using these new APIs, this feature is quite a value-

add for any application you build.

The ASP.NET Portal Framework

During the days of ASP.NET 1.0, developers could go to the ASP.NET team’s site (found at http://

www.asp.net) and download some Web application demos called IBuySpy., These demos were known

as Developer Solution Kits and are used as the basis for many of the Web sites on the Internet today.

Some were even extended into Open Source frameworks such as DotNetNuke.

 IBuySpy was that you could use the code it provided as a basis to build either a Web store or a portal. You simply took the base code as a starting point and extended it. For example,

you could change the look and feel of the presentation part of the code or introduce advanced function-

ality into its modular architecture. Developer Solution Kits were quite popular because they made per-

forming these types of operations so easy.

Because of the popularity of frameworks such as IBuySpy, ASP.NET 2.0 offers built-in capability for

using Web Parts to easily build portals. The possibilities for what you can build using the new Portal

Framework is astounding. The power of building using Web Parts is that it easily enables end users to

completely customize the portal for their own preferences. Figure 1-5 shows an example application

built using Web Parts.