Just a general question:

Someone had suggested this book to help me learn ASP.Net for an upcoming project I have. It's been great so far, but I have recently learned that I will need to make my website 2.0 compatible instead of 3.5

So far I've completed up to Chapter 12, using an install of VS 2005 updated with SP1 and Ajax. Everything in the book has worked fine, with the exception of a little of the C# syntax. (Imar does a great job through out the book of noting what has changed in the different versions of ASP.Net which has helped out a lot.)

I guess my question is, if I continue to work my way through the book, skipping Chapter 13 (LINQ, which I know is exclusive to 3.5), will I be able to use the rest of the material in the subsequent Chapters? I'm assuming I will lose some of the database related functionality for some of the pages, but other than that, is there any thing largely different that I should be on the lookout for?

Thanks in advance,
Jason

Hi Jason,

I think you'll find that you can use the 3.5 book to learn 2.0 as well. Many concepts are still the same: stuff like the control architecture, security, personalization and more are similar or even identical to their 2.0 counterparts.

So you should be able to take the book and use it to learn how to make 2.0 web sites. VS 2008 makes this very easy with its multi targeting feature. Simply specify the correct version of the framework when creating a new project (or use the project's Properties dialog to switch later) and VS only shows you relevant stuff. That means it won't show you the new ListView control in a 2.0 project for example, making it difficult to accidentally use unsupported features.

At the same time, using multi framework targeting you can still take advantage of other cool features like the designer, the new CSS tools and JavaScript debugging.

Hope this helps,

Imar

---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
Everyone is unique, except for me.
Author of Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 : in C# and VB, ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results and Dreamweaver MX 2004
Want to be my colleague? Then check out this post.

While you can target an assembly for a particular framework in VS2008, the .NET 3.0/3.5 compiler can do some things for you that can mess you up later. For example, you can target a class library at 2.0, but still use the automatic property feature of C# 3.5. The 3.5 compiler handles the conversion of the syntactic sugar, turning it into 2.0 legal MSIL. If you are doing this inside a web page, you won't notice the problem initially. However, when you go and deploy this to a real server environment running 2.0 only, that syntax doesn't work. Of course, this would only apply to a non-precompiled web site. This problem has caught me when I've tried to share projects between VS2005 and 2008. While an assembly compiled in VS08 for 2.0 works perfectly fine when run in 2.0, the code itself is not VS2005 friendly. The 2.0 compiler doesn't understand the syntax regardless of the outcome being legal.

-Peter
compiledthoughts.com

Can you please explain the following:
C#2.0,3.0,3.5
.NET 2.0,3.0,3.5
ASP.NET 2.0,3.0,3.5

Thanks
Simm

In order, the refer to version numbers of the C# programming language, the complete .NET Framework and the part of the .NET framework for web development: ASP.NET.

What is your exact question about this? And is this related to my book Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 : in C# and VB somehow?

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
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Author of Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 : in C# and VB, Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix
and Beginning ASP.NET 4 : in C# and VB.
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