| ASP.NET has become standard for
Web applications run on servers powered by Microsoft
Windows. Version 2.0 of Microsoft .Net aims to reduce
the amount of code written for common web programming
by 70% or more. New services, controls, and features
make ASP.NET 2.0 almost as dramatic an improvement
to ASP.NET 1.x as that was to ASP Classic.
Let us take a closer look into the new features
of .Net 2.0 and see how beneficial they are in our
applications.
Benefits Of .Net 2.0:
• Dynamic compilation
engine-In Visual Studio 2005, you no longer
need to compile all the files into an assembly.
The ASP.NET dynamic compilation engine allows to
automatically compile applications, that includes
.aspx, .cs, .vb files. That means, simply create
an application and publish it. You just need to
open the individual file which you want to make
the changes, and publish the code to the web server
without having to recompile.
• Compression of ViewState-There
are several factors affecting performance of our
web site and one of them is ViewState. ViewState
adds kilobytes of encoded data into your page. Used
wisely, it can simplify page development and improve
user interaction with your site. If left unchecked,
it can increase the size of your site's responses
dramatically and bring your response times to a
crawl over slow connections. In .Net 2.0, the overall
size of ViewState is reduced when it is serialized.
You can compress ViewState further using methods
available in .Net 2.0, thus improving the performance
of site.
• Leverages new IIS
6.0-Improve the reliability and usability
of Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 leverages new IIS
6.0 features for improved performance and scalability.
• Design features-Provide
enhanced design features to generate consistent
layouts and design. ASP.NET 2.0 supports master
pages, themes and skins to build applications with
a consistent page layout and design.
• Additional measurement
features-Ability to load-test web projects
to measure RPS (requests per second) throughput,
average latency, memory usage and dozens of other
metrics.• Profile code execution-Ability
to profile code execution of web projects, and analyze
the % of time spent where within a web project as
well as memory allocations and usage.
• New
Client Callback features -ASP.NET 2.0 includes
a new Client Callback feature that enables you to
retrieve page values and populate them to an already-generated
page with out reconstructing page. This makes it
possible to use on a page with out going through
the entire post back cycle; that means you can update
your pages without completely redrawing the page.
End users will not see the page flicker and reposition,
and the pages will have a flow of a thick client
application.
• UpdatePanel control-ASP.NET
AJAX provides many ways to improve user experience
and performance. One of the most common ways is
undoubtedly the UpdatePanel control. The UpdatePanel
control provides partial page rendering capabilities
to your web forms.
• Additional Controls-Use
AJAX library available on Microsoft site. It contains
many useful controls. These controls renders without
page getting flickered. So user feels like action
is taken on client side instead of server side.
Following are few examples
of controls from AJAX library
a. List Search box:
It renders through list items as you type.
b. Masked edit text box:
Restricts the kind of text that can be entered.
Masked Edit textbox applies a "mask" to
the input that permits only certain types of characters/text
to be entered. The supported data formats are: Number,
Date, Time, and DateTime.
c. Cascading drop downs:
Automatic population of a set of DropDownList controls.
It uses web service to retrieve the data.
d. Modal Popup:
To show modal dialog boxes to user for different
messages. The popup can be shown via server in code
behind and on the client in script by calling the
ModalPopupExtender methods to show and hide.
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