xii Introduction I started making plans for an ASP.NET 2.0 "big" book in the summer of 2004. The first outline I came up with listed more than 1,600 pages: definitely too much for a book, no matter how interesting the contents could be and regardless of how brilliant and entertaining the author could be. It's clear that 1,600 pages make up a tome that is way too difficult to manage--in every sense. A book that size would be difficult to manage for the author because of the tremendous amount of information to learn, digest, dissect, test, and then organize and present. It would be difficult to manage for the family of the author because such a big book would take no less than nine months of constant work, work that consumes the "day job" as well as kills spare time, kid time, wife time, and any other concept of time one may have. It would be difficult to manage for the editors who are charged with the critical task of making the whole tome readable and making it flow as smoothly as possible. It would be tough for the technical reviewers, who must ensure that the sample code works and that the pseudo-code looks like it should work. And finally, it would be difficult to manage for you--the reader--because a 1,600-page book is definitely heavy to move and cumbersome to thumb through. So we decided to split the original "big" book into two books-- Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0: Core Reference and this one, Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Top- ics. The sum of the two provides you with full coverage of the ASP.NET platform. We cut the original table of contents into two parts, inspired by the following principle: distinguish between what the typical ASP.NET developer wants to know first so that they will be able to cook up quality ASP.NET 2.0 applications quickly, and other topics that, while important, were either more advanced or didn't fall into the "must know first" category. These first-principle topics formed the contents of the Core Reference book. Other topics were left for this book. The descriptive title-- Advanced Topics--indicates that this book digs into topics you typically need to know about at a later time--after you've gained a good understanding of the core of the ASP.NET platform. On the other hand, thousands of developers followed the evolution of ASP.NET 2.0 from the be- ginning by participating in various programs and practicing with builds and tech previews. These potential readers might want to skip the first steps and start directly with, say, the compilation model or custom controls. All in all, ASP.NET is one big subject and my goal here is to provide you with the most accurate and insightful information possible. This requires a page count that exceeds any reasonable size for a book. So we split the subject into two mostly standalone books with minimal overlap while covering classic topics and more advanced topics, respectively. Individually, neither book covers the full set of ASP.NET topics, but together they provide state-of-the-art knowledge of the entire ASP.NET platform. This book is not a revamped and more in-depth version of the first. It simply extends and comple- ments the other by drilling down into some topics that were briefly mentioned in the other (for ex- ample, providers, controls, and compilation) and adds some new, more advanced topics (such as Web Parts, mobile controls, navigation, configuration and deployment).