My third Toolbox column in the March 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. The March issue of Toolbox examines the following two products:
I also review two books: Programming .NET Components 2nd Edition (O'Reilly), and Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005 (Apress). For those famliar with (the now defunct) Pro X series by Wrox, you're likely aware that the one thing all of those books had in common was their weight. They were all 1,000+ page titles authored by a committee. Pro ASP.NET 2.0 has the familiar weight and page count (topping out at more than 1,200 pages), but to its credit this book does a good job of focusing on the more important topics and just skimming through the more periphery ones. From the Toolbox column:
To the authors' credit, Pro ASP.NET 2.0 does a good job of balancing the task of covering a wide array of topics and covering them in depth. The central ASP.NET ideas are explored in detail, with sections on the core concepts, data access, and security each examined over roughly 200 pages. The more peripheral subjects—building custom server controls, advanced Web services, dynamic graphics, and client-side callbacks, among others—are covered in just an overview. This approach strikes the perfect balance between the breadth and the depth of the material.
Pro ASP.NET 2.0 focuses on real-world issues and concerns. Rather than just talking about the power of the provider model, the authors provide working examples of plausible custom providers for membership, profiles, and site navigation. Furthermore, the book covers the trade-offs that accompany various design decisions. For example, in the profiles chapter there's a discussion on when to store data using the default profile provider versus using a custom provider, or simply moving the data to a separate, specific table.
You can keep abreast of the latest Toolbox articles through the column's RSS feed or the Toolbox column category here on my blog.
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The most challenging aspect of authoring this monthly column is finding products to review! If you have any ideas or suggestions for products or books to review, please don't hesitate to send them to toolsmm@microsoft.com (which gets auto-forwarded to me).
The only requirements for reviewed products are that:
- They are useful by developers in their day-to-day operations
- The use/run on Microsoft technologies
- They are commercial applications (i.e., not freeware)
- They are not overly complex/costly.
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