I often see questions in the forums regarding ASP.NET books, usually people ask not only about reference style books, but about more advanced books that explain not only ASP.NET basics but teach you to write real world applications.

I know a really good book on that topic. This book focuses on building a web portal including news system, guest book, user registration, e-shop and many other features. Actually, this portal is a popular starter-kit called "E-commerce starter-kit" or "The Beer House" that you can find here.

The book is called "ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution".

The new edition that describes ASP.NET 3.5 including LINQ and ASP.NET AJAX will soon arrive.

So, the books are highly recommended by many professional ASP.NET developers.

Introduction

Nowadays web isn't a web as it was 10 years ago. Web isn't a collection of static pages anymore. Actually, there was JavaScript and DHTML, but still web sites were far behind desktop applications in terms of interactivity. After the invention of AJAX it became possible to build really interactive web applications that are nearly the same as desktop applications except they are run in a browser.

Writing AJAX JavaScript code is a pretty routine task, so it's sensible to use a library that already has the necessary functionality. While Visual Studio 2008 has built-in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 library, it doesn't contain many useful things we need when we are writing rich Internet applications.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit or simply ACT is a thing that can help to write rich Internet applications. Basically, it's set a of useful interactive web controls that we usually find in desktop applications, but missing in web applications. These controls include sliders, pop-up calendars, modal dialogs and many others. We don't have to write any JavaScript code to use them in our applications, we just need to use ACT controls that are very similar to ordinary ASP.NET controls.

ACT is run both by Microsoft and community, so everybody can take part in the creation of the decent AJAX toolkit. More...

Finally, I have installed Windows Live Writer and got amazed by its features. It does really simplify your blogging and save your time. With Live Writer you don't have to write a post in Word and then paste it to your blog, sometimes you even have to paste it to a another editor in order to get rid of Word text formatting. Now you don't have to do that.

Windows Live Writer supports many blogging platform, from Live Spaces to BlogEngine.NET and WordPress

Windows Live Writer has a built-in spell checker, so you don't need Word to check your spelling, it has nice formatting features, it supports different plug-in, so you can get a syntax highlighter, which is not available by default unfortunately. 

You can preview your posts, post preview is integrated into your blog design that looks awesome.

The only thing I didn't like is that it's not very obvious how to add new tags, because when your click the "TAG" button it only lists the existing tags, you can add new ones in the "Keywords field in the properties section.

If you have a blog, then you want to promote it. It doesn’t matter whether you are motivated by money or by recognition.  It you release your writings to public, then you want people to read them. Nowadays one of the most popular promotion techniques is sending links to social bookmarking web sites. The most popular social bookmarking web site is Digg.com. But does Digg work perfectly for every blog? I mean, can you promote every blog with Digg? More...

In the previous part of the tutorial we learnt how to use SQL Server Compact Edition in our application. In this part we are going to learn how to synchronize the data between Compact Edition and a regular verson of SQL Server.

Visual Studio 2008 has built-in Synchronization Services that we’ll be using in our project. More...

Since I have already touched a topic of SQL Server, I want to inform that Discount ASP.NET has launched SQL 2008 Hosting Beta Program. If you are already a subscriber of Discount ASP.NET, you can activate it in your control panel, if not, then you can subscribe if you are looking for a good hosting provider.

Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition is an embeded database that allows you to integrate it in your destkop and mobile applications. It can be used in a variety of scenarios, just some examples:

• a single-user application that still stores its data in the SQL database
• a local cache of a remote SQL Server database,
• a mobile application that synchronizes its local compact database with a remote database from time to time.

SQL Server Compact Edition takes about 1.5 MB on HDD and consumes about 5 MB of RAM. It’s free to use and free to distribute with your application. More...

I have just returned from my great journey! It was marvelous! Besides Czech Republic and Germany I also visited Austria, its beautiful capital - Vienna, although I didn't plan that before.

Anyway, after a week break, I'm getting back to blogging.

I’m on vacation for the next week, so I won’t post anything. I’ll be travelling to the centre of Europe – Czech Republic. I’ll be in Prague mosly, but will visit some other beautiful small towns, like Cesky Krumlov. I’ll also visit Germany for a day.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to going there :-)!

I read about the PHP Implementation of LINQ called PHPLinq. Frankly, I was sceptical about it. Finally, I gave it a try. I still remain sceptical...

Let’s me explain why. Take a look at this fairly simple example More...