Creating Your First ASP.NET 4 Web Site

You probably can’t wait to get started with your first ASP.NET web site, so instead of giving you a theoretical overview of web sites in VWD, the next Try It Out exercise dives right into the action and shows you how to build your first web project. Then, in the How It Works explanation and the section that follows, you get a good look at what goes on behind the scenes when you view an ASP.NET page in your browser.

Chapter 57: Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0

What’s in This Chapter?

• Different types of workflows: Sequential and State Machine

• Built-in activities

• Creating custom activities

• Workflow Services

• Integration with WCF

• Hosting Workflows

• Tips for migrating to Workflow Foundation 4

This chapter presents an overview of the Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0 (known as WF throughout the rest of this chapter), which provides a model to define and execute processes using a set of building blocks called activities. WF provides a Designer that, by default, is hosted within Visual Studio, and that allows you to drag and drop activities from the toolbox onto the design surface to create a workflow template.

This template can then be executed by creating a WorkflowInstance and then running that instance. The code that executes a workflow is known as the WorkflowRuntime, and this object can also host a number of services that the running workflows can access. At any time, there may be several workflow instances executing, and the runtime deals with scheduling these instances and saving and restoring state; it can also record the behavior of each workflow instance as it executes.

Chapter 56: LINQ to SQL

What’s In This Chapter?

• Working with LINQ to SQL using Visual Studio 2010

• Mapping LINQ to SQL objects to database entities

• Building LINQ to SQL operations without the O/R Designer

• Using the O/R Designer with custom objects

• Querying the SQL Server database using LINQ

• Stored procedures and LINQ to SQL

You will probably find the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework (LINQ) in C# 2010 to be one of the more exciting features the language has to offer. Basically, what LINQ provides is a lightweight façade over programmatic data integration. This is such a big deal because data is king.

Pretty much every application deals with data in some manner, whether that data comes from memory (in-memory data), databases, XML files, text files, or something else. Many developers find it very difficult to move from the strongly typed object-oriented world of C# to the data tier where objects are second-class citizens. The transition from one world to the next was a kludge at best and was full of error-prone actions.

In C#, programming with objects means a wonderful, strongly typed ability to work with code. You can navigate very easily through the namespaces, work with a debugger in the Visual Studio IDE, and more. However, when you have to access data, you will notice that things are dramatically different.