Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5

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I've read the author's articles on Code Project, and when I found out he had written a book that built on them, I didn't waste any time getting my hands on it!

Being the one of the few developers in my group that work with the latest "cutting edge" technology, and with no one to answer the questions I have, this book has simply been the fountain of knowledge I'd been looking for. Definitely a must-read for those wishing to utilize the latest and greatest.

The book is well organized, and the writing style makes it an easy read (usually technical books put me to sleep, but not this one). It does assume that you've already had some experience using ASP.NET 2.0/3.5, Javascript, and so forth, so I agree that this book will be the most beneficial to seasoned and advanced ASP.NET developers.

This book explains the techniques behind the DropThings portal [...] showing some source-code (available at www.codeplex.com) and giving a couple of tips and tricks of web 2.0 programming. The book is very interesting but it's for those developers who already know the technologies it covers (ASP.NET, C#, LINQ, WF and ASP.NET AJAX) and want to know "the best way to do it" or became aware of commom problems that big web 2.0 portals generally has.
Below is the main topics of each chapter:

Chapter 1 - Conceptual meanings of Web and ASP.NET.
Chapter 2 - How can you design your own Widgets Framework (Based on his ideas that lead him to develop his own framework) and things that you need to concern when you develop a big portal.
Chapter 3 - Tips and Tricks of developing rich client controls
Chapter 4 - How can you add LINQ and Workflow Foundation to your Data and Business Layers.
Chapter 5 - Developing Widgets itself
Chapter 6, 7, 8 and 9 - Reflections over performance (at Client, Server and "client-server" interaction)
Chapter 10 - Solving Deployment and "Go-live" problems.

Bear in mind this book don't teach you those technologies, it only leads you to use them in a better way based on the author's experience (Author is the PageFlake's co-Founder and CTO, so he really knows what he's talking about).

In conclusion, if you want to learn how you use those technologies (Asp.net Ajax, Workflow Foundation..), I recommend you to try other books. Otherwise, if you want to know more about how to create a scalable web 2.0 site, tips & tricks and the best practices of those techs at web, this book will hit at the bullseye.

Omar is an excellent .NET programmer and I really enjoyed his book. This book gave excellent insight on running a high volume website with ASP.NET. It also dives into some of the new features of the .NET 3.5 framework. I really enjoyed the sections towards the end where he showed the type of hosting environment necessary to run a large scale website. I would also recommend subscribing to Omar's RSS feeds for excellent tips.

Wow this is a great book.

When I first opened up 'Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5' I expected this to be just any old ASP.NET web development/admin book but I was very pleasantly surprised.

Brevity is the champ here, with this book coming in at just under 300 pages but man the content is dense. The focus is on managing and developing your ASP.NET 2.0 portal (as the title suggests). Here's a McKinnon Overview:

01. Introducing Web Portals
02. Architecting the Web Portal
03. Building the Web Layer Using ASP.NET AJAX
04. Building the Data and Business Layers Using .NET 3.5
05. Building Client-Side Widgets
06. Optimizing ASP.NET AJAX
07. Creating Good Web Services
08. Improving Server-Side Performance
09. Improving Client-Side Performance
10. Solving Common Challenges

The focus is on portal development but I feel that all the content within is applicable to all .NET web developers. Applying Web 2.0 concepts, you will learn how to architect more efficient solutions in todays web world. You will learn the ins and outs and it will be fun at that.

Great book, pick it up today.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This book is very well written. It provides lots of good tricks to handle real-world problems that come up when developing a website. One of the best ASP.NET books I have read. It is about developing a website all the way through, not about explaining the newer technologies. Not for beginners.

With this book Author has set bar very high on how to write technical books. It dose a good job of explaining finer points of all technologies involved in AJAX asp.net programming in the context of building portal. Its a must read if u are looking for techniques to build high performance web sites.

Great list of details you need to address to create a scalable, fully functional website with all the gadgets you've seen but never known how to incorporate into your web site. Must read book.

Very good book, the website provided by the book inspires me to learn more about ajax.

If you have an idea and would like to develop an application that is simple, robust and reliable, please read this book. It talks about how to use your limited hardware resources efficiently to host applications.