As context, I programmed in classic ASP and had experience with Java and VB.NET prior to purchasing this book, but I had not really worked with ASP.NET. I found this book an easy read, very clear, and broken up nicely to that I can use it as a reference. The examples are especially helpful, as they contain just enough context for each concept, but are not so specific that I have trouble translating them to match my own needs.

It was my mistake to buy this book. As many I trusted WROX. By now I have read chapters 1 to 11 and my impression is that code was never tested. The book text doesn't match to Code. Errata could be 3 times larger and so on.
I have a lot of books in my library, but could not recollect anything worse than this one. I will not forget this author.

It is difficult to find one book that will tell you everything you need to know. I do believe this book makes an honorable attempt at showing you what you need to know to develop 2.0 websites. The book topics range from talking about how to use the new features within the ide to packaging and deploying your finished products. Get up to speed on master pages, validation, themes, membership and roles security, caching, etc. Although you won't necessarily become an overnight expert by reading this book it will certainly show you what you need to get up to speed on how to develop 2.0 websites professionally.

I bought the books in the hopes that I would learn asp.net 2.0, but this book is an utter disappointment. The writers might know what there talking about but it all just seems to be a lot of hot air. It's almost as if they were having fun with Microsoft's words spell checker technical/formal writing settings, to seriously make its readers get an aneurysm in trying to comprehend what ever it is there trying to say..

If your a beginner stay far away, if you graduated Harvard and have a masters doctorate with a IQ of 300 then this book is for you...

Might be a valuable reference. I'll never know. I was going to use this book to learn .NET 2.0, but it is really boring. I just couldn't take it. Give me a 200 page book with the highlights instead.

I bought this book before realizing that there was probably a newer edition "Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition" by the exact same authors released in Oct 2006 with 300 more pages. I haven't seen the new one, but I suspect it is this one in a newer release. Why this title hasn't been retired is a mystery, but I can't fault Amazon because it is still listed on the Wrox site as if it is a current book.

I bought this book before realizing that there was probably a newer edition "Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition" by the exact same authors released in Oct 2006 with 300 more pages. I haven't seen the new one, but I suspect it is this one in a newer release. Why this title hasn't been retired is a mystery, but I can't fault Amazon because it is still listed on the Wrox site as if it is a current book.

Provides a great reference to almost all classes, excellent for the beginner. One suggestion would have been to create an entire application - step by step at the end of each chapter as an exercies .

The book dives straight into the code and technicals and doesn't give enough context behind what is going on. I gave it up after first 2 chapters.

This book only mostly explains basic functionality like how to drag and drop controls, etc. When I purchased this book, I expected to find out how to go beyond this basic functionality like customizing controls, using templates and thorough explanation about them.
This book is not for professionals.

Don't say I did not warn you, this book is not for ASP.NET newbies. I'm fairly good with VB.NET and yet I simply can't use this book to learn ASP.Net. You will not even get past the first few pages.
Another thing I don't like about this book is that it dives into technical details without give you the whole picture about what is a proper ASP.Net website.After reading this book you would not have a concept in your mind about how to build an ASP.Net. It's just bits here and bits there.

The Wrox Press books are always well written and good for tutoring yourself in a new technology or enhancing your skills in an existing one.

I only had experience with classic ASP and found the book very useful as an introduction to ASP.NET and the .NET class library.

Having all code samples in both Visual Basic and C# makes the book easier to read, and you get a good feel for both languages at the same time.

The negatives: the book is a bit verbose at times, and some of the chapters would have benefited from a bit more depth.

What I expect from series "professionals" - is not covering all topics on a level "how to drag a control from toolbox" but a deep discussion(why(background), what(internals) and how(valuable examples)) on the most important and difficult topics of the domain, using "real-life" examples(the examples in the book are useless).
The content lacks a holistic approach(don't like collected stories). Let it be not an all-in-all tutorial but some concept and in-depth material on the most significant topics.(though the publisher won't benefit from this kind of strategy - it's always better to write a dozen of books of one domain than having one may be two volumes covering essentials).

A very(!) good example of book for professionals(asp.net 1.1) - is the book of Fritz Onion - "Essential ASP.NET With Examples in C#".
Overall the book is good(for beginners) or for upgrading from previous version of asp.net(though it could have been more compact then).

This is an excellent book covering ASP.net 2.0. It is very professional but, not for any beginner. It has the first 2 chapters which pretty much cover the basics but, throughout the rest of the book you need to know what you are doing. It is very detailed but is not really "step-by-step" like 1-2-3...It will walk you through how to do something through reading; so if your not one of those people who dont like to read, I wouldnt fully recommend this book to you. It shows a many screenshots in there so it makes it fairly simple to follow along. The book has almost 1300 pages and is very helpful if you are willing to take out the reading glasses and read a little bit. Overall, its an outstanding book!

I'm only on chapter 4 of this book so there is time for the book to improve but I have found more serious errors especially in the code samples than I usually find in Wrox books. Although many of the errors are corrected in errata on the wrox.com website, some are not.

I'm going to focus on one single code sample to give you an example of the type of problems this book has. On page 127 there is an example of how to make callbacks with parameters. It uses a web service called Weather to get temperature for any zip code.

1. This uses some very complex features of ASP with callbacks, dynamically generated javascript and a web service call, yet it is in chapter 4 of 29. It is not explained at all well and there is no attempt to explain why you need to generate the javascript and register it dynamically.

2. It requires you to register a web service and refers you generically to chapter 26. It should either have been after chapter 26 or the precise steps to register this web service should have been explained in the example.

3. It contains several errors in the sample code all of which are critical and some of which are not in the errata at this time. For those of you who are having problems with this example you need to change the line

Dim ws As New weather.TemperatureService
to
Dim ws As New net.xmethods.www.TemperatureService

in the VB code behind (or similarly in the C# code) if you take the defaults while registering the web service. As the book doesn't indicate how to register the service I assume most people will take the default as I did.

4. The book doesn't mention that the service takes several minutes to respond. Not a very impressive introduction to web services and quite frustrating if you, as I was, are expecting a response within a few seconds.

The number of problems I found with this one example make me hope the author of this chapter had nothing else to do with the book. The editor did a poor job here and I pray the rest of the book is up to Wrox standards.

I think that at this point, it's fair to say that anyone still using Notepad to generate ASP.NET apps should stop wasting time and get up to speed on Visual Studio! I can't understand why so many authors insist on using examples generated in Notepad to teach ASP.NET, and never will.

This book provides some really good insight into VWD, and that is exactly the way that ALL ASP.NET apps should be written - no exceptions. As a professional, I look for ways to streamline projects, and VS is without a doubt the unsurpassed IDE for doing just that! This book uses VWD to show you how to do things, and there is no confusion about how it is being demonstrated. Good job, guys...

This book builds on the Beginning book to take Web development to a whole new level. Examples are in C# and VB. Easy to read, solid consistent programming style that would work in any shop! Definitely 5 Stars!

In the classical Wrox Press approach this 1,000+ page volume covers a LOT of stuff. I approached this book as someone very familiar with 1.0 who just needed to get up-to-speed with 2.0. For that I whole-heartedly recommend it. I used this book for just-in-time learning I was architecting a new enterprise application and wanted to implement the ASP.NET 2.0 approach to master pages, themes and skins, roles and membership, site navigation, AJAX, and more. I found it easy to read each chapter on the particular technology and then put it in place in your own app. If you are completely new to ASP.NET, I probably wouldn't recommend this book to you. You will probably find that one of Jesse Liberty's books covers the learning curve at a better pace.

Very nice book for beginers and for Intermediate Level. Gives out infortmation on all subjects concerning asp.net 2.0. Has appropriate examples which are easy to be understood.

The books starts with Introduction and moves on explaining about Ado.Net, XML, Controls and almost everything that is required for a .Net professional.

A Must Read.

Deepak Sharma
http://www.orientindia.biz

I was creating a new project in classic ASP, and about a week into it, decided to do it ASP.Net. ASP.Net 2.0 is hot, no more PHP and MySQL for me.

First Off, ASP.Net 2.0 is awesome, and what you can do with it is amazing. After a month of writing in it, I have cut my development time down in half compared to PHP, or even just ASP classic. I had no idea just how powerful it was. Microsoft did a great job on this one.

As far as the book goes, If your good in classic ASP, Visual Basic, Visual C, then this is the book for you. I read the first couple of chapters, and had a complete understanding of what ASP.net was, and what you can do with it. The next couple of chapters shows off the power of the server controls, so you know what to choose when needed. You get code examples in C Sharp and VB. The middle of the book show the use of XML, ADO, Data Binding, SQL Server 2005, which is now a snap. The end of the book shows off what you can do with mobile phones, and how to make a Windows type setup program for your ASP.Net project when your done. The example code is useless, but does show how to use the languade in the proper context.

The book works and gives your the information you need, if your an experienced programmer and already know vb or C real well.

If this is the Professional version I really wonder what the Beginning version is like.

I found the book to be extremely disappointing.....unfortunately I couldn't give it a zero.
A few examples:
1. The index is absolutely useless. For example, you won't find MultiView or the Wizard Server Control in the index.
2. I couldn't find anything on the RowCommand which is associated with the GridView and the replacement for the ItemCommand. Definitely something that should be part of any discussion on GridView.
3. Strongly Typed DataSets and ObjectDataSources are not mentioned!
4. Most of the examples I looked at are so basic as to be worthless.

MSDN and Google will give you much better information than you will find in this book.

You know how you read through many books and now Blogs trying to find nuggets, but often than not you just want to find the go to place for good solid reference? Well it seems like I find that each time the technology is interated, like now to .NET 2.0. I think I latched on pretty early to my GoTo book, Professional ASP.NET 2.0 from Wrox. Thoses guys seem to always get it right when producing books that I can really dig my teeth into and get things done.

First they chose some solid authors, Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, Farhan Muhammad, Srinivas Sivakumar and Devin Rader. I know Hanselman's blog real well,but the other guys are well published Regional Director types. I like those types =>.

Anyway, to the book. I think it really does a good job of breaking up the important pieces of what is new in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 into 29 action packed chapters with two good apendixes. I like this because I can just go to the chapter I need help on and get it, don't have to wonder or wander too much ti find the meat I need.

I found the chapters on Master Pages and Themes extremely well writen and helped get the concepts and start applying some advanced features pretty quickly to my latest sites (I will start posting reviews and links shortly). I was so relieved to see how these technologies work compared to creating skins for DotNetNuke, hey this is easy!

The next thing of importance to me was Users and Roles. Again this book hit a huge homerun with me. Within two or three days of coding and testing I had a pretty solid set of code for my web sites to reliably utilize the membership provider, which rocks by the way.

There are a lot of things that were merely reviews and introductions to new features of the VB framework, but I think those types of chapters are extremely important to have. I mean yah collections is not new, but generics are. I have not applied them yet, but I am sure I will.

The book is huge, well written, and worth every penny of the $33 it cost at Amazon! Which is another thing, books do not sem to be costing a small mortgage anymore, great!

This book is a great foundation in learning ASP.Net 2.0 prior to old version,it provides some in-depth details of this new Microsoft Technology. Transitioning from ASP.Net 1.0 to ASP.Net 2.0 is relatively easy and it clearly tackles several new features like Master page,personalization etc. Kudos to Author and WROX!!!!

I have just switched from 1.0 to 2.0, This book allowed me to actually get all the examples working within one week. The only problems I had were SQL Server access rights, which I solved with the help of the WWW. This is one of the best books I have used to learn a new API.
Nice To have:
1. Instructions on solving the most common SQL access errors.
2. How to replace SQLExpress with SQL Server
It is packed book of very well explained examples!!!

I dont know why Wrox titled this book Professional ASP.NET 2.0. There is nothing in this book that professionals can gain from. Authors dont even bother giving you some best practices of professional programming. They start with the VS2005 IDE description and go on with explaining of all there is to explain for controls and other features of ASP.NET 2.0 programming but all examples use the minimal implementation. I was waiting to see any trick or customize solution but couldn't find any. I think the most important part of the ASP.NET 2.0 is Membership, Roles and Profiles, but I could not find anything in this book to help me more then what MSDN already has. At least MSDN has some examples of how to write your own providers.
To conclude, this book is a reference book, but not for profesionals.

With the 2.0 release it seems that ASP.NET has become ready for prime time. I found the earlier versions so verbose and so demanding that everything be done exactly right that I decided to wait for the next release and it's here. The addition of Visual Web Developer (part of Visual Studio 2005) has rounded out the picture. The use of an IDE like this gives a lot of assistance in speeding up the writing of code. It's a lot better than just using something like Notepad.

This book was written with an emphasis on the new features built into ASP.NET 2.0. The authors say that experience with previous versions of ASP.NET is assumed but that if you understand the basics of Web programming you shouldn't have any trouble. If you don't have experience with ASP.NET, I'd recommend you also getting the Wrox book Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in addition to this one. The two books have an entirely different set of authors, and even when they are talking about the same subject, they use different words. Sometimes just reading different words helps you to understand better.

This book is a very good reference book to everything there is to know about ASP.NET 2.0. It's over 200 pages of small type. If you're going to be doing work in ASP.NET I don't see how you could be without it. It's not the simplest book to read, but it's all there.

This book has an outstanding balance. It introduces the new aspects of ASP.NET2 to developers while also going deep into items that have been with ASP.NET since the beginning - providing some good best practices. The authors do a good job of explaining complex topics and don't jibber-jabber too much - but instead get right to the point. That makes for a pleasant read. As stated in other reviews, this is a big book and covers A LOT of ground. ASP.NET2 is just plain huge now compared to ASP.NET1 and you need a book like this at your desk to reference. Since I have to work on projects sometimes in VB and other times C#, I was glad to see that the code example were in both languages. One important point of this book to realize is that this is a 'HOW-TO' book more than anything. There aren't long tables of objects and definitions like you see in other books. This book instead introduces topics and then usually shows you how to do it for yourself. That's my type of book!

After going theru the jesse Liberty visual basic 2005 I then felt that I was ready for the a more advanced book so I decided to give a wrox book a shot. Oh boy this was a mistake. Th update methods in the gridview examples didn't work,. Tha asynchronous sample did not work. Some of the site map examples did not work, but I was happy with the chapters 1-14. Then all of a sudden this book then took a dark side and just like any other badly written wrox book I have used in the last 5 years. it started taking shortcuts. Half way thru the book half the explantaion is missing. Granted that is this is professional asp.net 2.0 I would not expect most of the code to be missing for the code samples for the rest of the book.. It is true from the other reviews that this book does cover a large area and it is a good read. For a hands-on guy like me. I am disapointed on the quality of the material and its explanations. This book will need three or four other books on asp.net 2.0 open to attempt to debug and make some of the code to work on this book. I see that there are 5 authors for this book, there shouldn't be any excuse for this. I rather hoped that this book come out later and written properly than waste my time.

I got the book on Saturday and have read through about 1/2 of it as of Monday morning. It looks like a good reference book so far, and I'm sure I'll be using it some as I code. I just wanted to share some of my thoughts...

I've been using ASP 1-3 since about 1998 on fairly large scale production apps, so have some experience with it. I've tinkered with ASP.NET 1.x and have taken classes on it, but haven't worked with it on a production app yet.

I've ordered a couple of .Net 2.0 books, this was the first to arrive. I've been to the recent MS events RE: VS2005 including the launch event, and have been looking forward to getting this book to clear up some questions.

I really liked the explanation in the book regarding the new folders VS 2005 uses. Same for the overview of the IDE. I wish there was more coverage, but as mentioned, this book is about 1200 pages already. This subject needs multiple books to cover it all.

I like the writing style for the most part, better than some of the other Wrox books I've got (especially one dealing with Sharp Develop). The first few chapters are great (the IDE, etc.) but you can tell someone else wrote the chapters covering some of the components.

I'm learning a lot from this, but it's also leaving me with questions. For example, in .Net 1.1, you could set a default namespace for a web app which was then used for all the code you created. I don't see that in VS 2005, nor do I see any explanation about why it might not be necessary or how to do it if I wanted to. Maybe it'll be explained later in the book.

Overall, so far I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a good overview of a lot of aspects regarding ASP.NET 2.0. It won't answer everything in depth, but it does provide a good kickstart. It's certainly more fun (for me anyway) to read a book than to read online documentation from MS.

For the past three years I've been teaching my high school computer science students webmatrix. In fact, I wrote curriculum for Microsoft and was the Technical Editor for some other asp.net curriculum. To keep up with the new technology, I realized I needed to start learning ASP.NET 2.0.
I started to read this BIG book and already I'm on Chapter 9 in only a week of reading. The book clearly explains the new features of ASP.NET 2.0 in a clear and concise manner. The screen shots and code examples in both C# and VB.NET are excellent. You can download the code from [...].
This is a great reference and should be on your christmas list!
Read more in my blog if you want:
http://www.geekswithblogs.net/bscarbeau

A previous reviewer (Sven) mentioned that the book omitted some more advanced topics. 1 of the examples cited was how to access MasterPage properties from a content page. Not only is this information there (page 263), but there are 2 examples, and the specific location is referenced in the Table of Contents as "Working with Controls and Properties from the Master Page"

Just thought I'd mention this since I chose to go w/ another book because of that review, only to find as I sit here and browse this book that it does in fact go into a good amount of detail. I hope the one I did order is as good.

Not a stranger to ASP.NET 1.1, I picked up this book in an effort to see what's new in ASP.NET 2.0 as well as have a source on hand with examples and such that I can refer to as needed.

I couldn't be more pleased.

For those new to ASP.NET, this book runs through everything from the development environment to the structure of an application and uses detailed code snippets to allow you to create simple proof-of-concept apps using the technology being discussed. For the old hands, the new material is covered well and in many cases is compared and contrasted with previous versions so you know what benefits you're getting by upgrading to 2.0. Entire chapters are dedicated to some of the new features like personalization and themes, making sure that both newbies and veterans alike are brought up to speed.

Code snippets abound and exist in both VB and C#, so it doesn't matter what language you lean toward, there's something here for you. The writing style is clear and easy to understand so you won't get too bogged down in jargon. Note that this is definitely more of a "how to" type of book than a reference - if you find yourself asking "How would I...?" then this is the way to go. If you already know what you're doing and want the annotated class reference with super detailed information about the trivial inner workings of the framework, you may want to look elsewhere.

My only real complaint is the typesetting. The text could have been bumped up a couple of points for those of us who rely on glasses and the like, but the book is already upwards of 1200 pages long and I understand that printing volumes of encyclopedias isn't so effective for transport.

If you're into ASP.NET, add this one to your shelf - you'll be glad you did.

If you are looking for a great book for learning ASP.net 2.0 and Visual Web Developer 2005, then this is the book. Most of the Asp books I looked at still use notepad or something like that. This is one of the few the use VWD 2005. The book uses VWD that is part of Visual Studio 2005, but it is the same as one that you can download for free at www.asp.net (not exactly, but very close). I really like the fact that it spent a little time talking about VWD 2005, explaining the ins and outs of it. With such great tools that are available from Microsoft, both free and to purchase, it does not make any since to use anything else, in my opinion.

This book uses both VB and C# code in the book. It is nice having both sets of code in the book and not a separate download. At first I didn't like seeing both languages. But as I read the book and worked thru the samples, it was nice to be able to see how it is done in both using both. I am learning C# now, but I need to be able to work with VB also. So this worked great.

This book would work well for someone who is just starting with 2.0. I think as long as you have some programming experience, you will be able to follow along. But an experienced .net developer will enjoy this book also, because of the detailed explanation of advanced topics. It starts off talking about web forms and controls then moves to web services and validation controls. It has a detailed section on Master pages and themes, two of the really cool new features in 2.0. It has a great section working with data, roles, site navigation, security, debugging, business objects and overall administration.

I am coming from a classic asp background, and was a little nervous about getting a "professional" book to start with. But after reading it for a week now, this is the book that stays on my desk all the time when I am writing code.

To sum up,
* Great book
* Easy to read and follow
* Uses Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio 2005
* both VB and C# code in the book (not as a separate download)
* Starts off slow enough for beginners
* Has advanced topics for pros.

The book covers a lot of ground and does most of it very well. It's both good as a reference and as a tutorial.

Unfortunately, some of the advanced topics are left out. When discussing Master Pages, the book does not mention how to get a strongly-typed Master property in the Page object. (Use the MasterPageFile page directive.) When discussing configuration of ASP.NET applications, the authors have one paragraph mentioning the possibility of encrypting configuration file contents, but omit showing how to do it. (Use aspnet_regiis -p[e|d](f).)

Overall, for such a thick book, I would have expected more advanced content. However, as a book for programmers with some experience to make the step to ASP.NET 2.0, I think it's right on the mark.