Summary

In this first chapter you were given an overview of an aggressive plan to develop a highly functional content-based web site that shows you how to use ASP.NET to its full capacity. I gave you a broad idea about what we're going to discuss, design, and implement throughout the rest of the book. In each chapter, you'll learn something new about ASP.NET 2.0, and at the end of the book you will also have created a real-world site with most of the features required by modern content-centric sites and e-commerce stores. Furthermore, the site you develop in this book may provide a good deal more functionality than any site you've designed in the past, and the relatively small development effort will enable you to do more than you thought possible in a small amount of time. Microsoft has stated that one of their key goals in the 2.0 release is to make a developer's job easier: to reduce the amount of effort required to implement common functionality, thereby giving them more time to focus on business needs, and enabling them to offer more advanced functionality to empower users and site administrators, while keeping the site maintainable and scalable. This book will help you judge whether Microsoft has met this goal. Let this adventure begin!