1.4. Wrapping up

Looking over this Wrox Blox, it should be plain to see that you have only just begun your trip down the rabbit hole that is ASP.NET. You have not even begun to examine a vast majority of the server controls that are available to you, the different ways to retrieve data, and the list goes on and on. However, one thing that I do want to spend a moment on is the ability that ASP.NET gives you to break out your application into logical parts. Throughout this Wrox Blox, there have been two parts to each Web Form: the UI (.aspx pages) and the logic for the page (.aspx.cs files). While this works quite well, and although this may be a matter of opinion, it is widely considered a "best practice"; you should further break your application into files that handle nothing but database connectivity. This is known as n-Tier architecture, and it was not something that was easily, if at all, achievable in classic ASP.

The reason for doing this varies, but a good example would be if the company you are working for all of a sudden decides that they are no longer going to use SQL Server as their RDBMS and, instead, are going to switch to Oracle. If you used the methodologies that have been demonstrated throughout this Wrox Blox in an entire application, you now have a significant problem because the System.Data.Sqlxxx namespaces are designed to only work with SQL Server. Now you must touch every file in your application so that they will work properly with Oracle! In an n-Tier-style application, however, you would only have to be concerned with a set number of files that deal with your database connectivity, thus making your life much less stressful. While I could expand this topic much further, I am going to let it rest here, but you should bear this in mind as you build ASP.NET web sites so that a "quick fix" today does not turn into a huge pain tomorrow.