Building Web apps with ASP.NET and Ajax

8 Aug

Last week I spent 4 days getting stuck into learning about ASP.NET on another Learning Tree International course called Building Web Applications with ASP.NET and Ajax: Hands-On. Richard Howells of Dynamisys once again led us through the course very well. With the usual Learning Tree mix of theory and practical exercises, we covered the following topics:

  • .NET application architecture (n-tier architecture, Web Farms, distributed objects vs. clustering, state and data consistency, the anatomy of an ASP.NET web application)
  • Data access via ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework (custom business objects: ORM-created vs. POCO objects)
  • ASP.NET application infrastructure (Web Form security, Web application state, exception handling, URL routing and page inheritance)
  • Applying business rules (managing business logic, overcoming concurrency issues, message queues and transactions)
  • Ajax Extensions (Controls: ScriptManager, ScriptManagerProxy, UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, Timer; and asynchronous triggers)
  • Ajax Control Toolkit (control extenders, native script controls, accessing WCF Web services)
  • jQuery (a comprehensive introduction to jQuery including a look at Microsoft jQuery Plugins)
  • Application deployment (Web Deploy, Web Packages, Web.config transformation)

As is always the case with these 4-day courses, the amount of new information to take on board was overwhelming. But the key is to go back over the course notes and exercise manual and to jump in at the deep end with an ASP.NET project.

This was the 8th and final Learning Tree course that I’m required to complete as part of an MSc in Professional Computing. Next up, a large postgraduate diploma level project due to commence next month.

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