Double Feature: ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET Ajax, and ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET has established itself as one of the most productive environments for building web applications and more developers are switching over every day. The 2.0 release of ASP.NET builds on the same componentry of 1.1, improving productivity of developers even further by providing standard implementations of common Web application features like membership, persistent user profile, and Web parts, among others. The 3.5 release adds several welcome features like the flexible ListView and the powerful EntityDataSource control.

ASP.NET Ajax is part of the ASP.NET 3.5 framework and adds support for building richer, more interactive Web applications. This new Web development framework from Microsoft provides both client-side and server-side components for closing the gap between web and desktop user interfaces. The accompanying Microsoft Ajax Libraries include a browser-neutral client script library that is easily integrated with existing Web applications (including ASP.NET 1.* and non-.NET sites), improving response times and enhancing UIs with DHTML and JavaScript features that in the past would have taken enormous development efforts and extensive client-side knowledge. ASP.NET 2.0 and newer applications can take advantage of the Ajax Extensions server-side features to further enhance their UIs, often through simple markup. This course walks you through the components of ASP.NET Ajax, asks you to build a number of Ajax-enabled ASP.NET applications, and shows how best to leverage the capabilities of the extensions to make your clients' experience a richer one.

ASP.NET MVC is a supplemental framework built on top of ASP.NET that supports the construction of Model View Controller based applications as an alternative to the post-back model of traditional ASP.NET applications. Building Web applications using MVC enables a clear separation of concerns between presentation and control logic, creates a test-friendly application that supports test-driven development (TDD), allows for finer-grained control over rendered HTML and JavaScript, and simplifies control over the URL space of an application. This course will dive into the MVC pattern and the ASP.NET MVC framework architecture to give you the knowledge you need to develop web applications using the ASP.NET MVC framework.