what's new and cool with ASP.NET 2.0 ?? Part 1

Hi there, the new buzz in the GIS community is the new features of ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Studio 2005. I am not about to compare it with Java, PHP, Macromedia etc but its worth knowing and learning the new features in ASP.NET. Why?? Because ArcGIS Server 9.2 is using a lot of its cool features. So maybe its worthwhile listing it:

Application-wide registration of custom controls
These are controls in web forms that we normally use - like menus and buttons. What if you have custom controls and wanna declare them globally - you can use add the Register directives to the web.config

Web Part controls
This is like a personalisation tool we use for each user's preference. Let me gice you an example: A user would like to log on to ArcGIS Server and selected a few tools he likes to use. Everytime he logs on, this is personalised for him.

With Web Parts, the ASP.NET team has given us a way to do that without writing any additional code. The WebPartZone control is used to define an “area” of the page that can be customized. Each zone can be made up of multiple parts which can be a ContentWebPart control, a custom control, or a UserControl. Used in conjunction with the WebPartManager controls, you can give your end users the ability to change where the controls in their page are displayed.

Posting to other pages
This is something web programmers scratch their heads with. Normally in application programming, we can send variables to other forms by declaring module or class based variables... its all in the same memory. Enterprise Web applications are not the same, the variables and results are in the server... server side programming.

ASP.NET 2.0 gives controls that cause a post-back to the server the ability to change the action of the form in the HTML page, causing the page’s state and data to be posted directly to an ASP.NET page other than the one that created it.

Master Pages

How many of you used Master Slides in Powerpoint presentations?? You can create a Master Slide and then add more content slides to your presentations. All the format, colouring, logo and design looks the same across all.

Well... in ASP.NET 2.0 there is a new feature called Master Pages. Master Pages are essentially ASP.NET syntax in a file with the .master extension. A Master Page can be created and serves the same purpose as the “master base class”. There are two main differences with the Master Page model in ASP.NET 1.1

One, the .master pages are visually designable. Not only that, when a .aspx page uses a Master Page, the visual elements from the Master Page are displayed in the design view of the .aspx page – grayed out. Two, the Master Page isn’t used as the base class for the .aspx file.


Check out these sites, there were developed using ASP.NET 2.0:

LondonStockExchange.com

Dell.com

Monster.com