DotNet Concepts

Q1.what are the new features in ASP.NET 2.0?

A1. ASP.NET is a programming framework built on the common language runtime that can be used on a server to build powerful Web applications. The first version of ASP.NET offered several important advantages over previous Web development models. ASP.NET 2.0 improves upon that foundation by adding support for several new and exciting features in the areas of developer productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance.

1) New Server Controls: ASP.NET 2.0 introduces many new server controls that enable powerful declarative support for data access, login security, wizard navigation, menus, treeviews, portals, and more. Many of these controls take advantage of core application services in ASP.NET for scenarios like data access, membership and roles, and personalization.

* Data Controls: gridview, detailsview, and formview

* Navigation Controls: treeview, menu, and sitemappath

* Login Controls: login forms, create user forms, password retrieval, and custom UI for logged in users or roles

* Web Part Controls

2) Master Pages: This feature provides the ability to define common structure and interface elements for your site, such as a page header, footer, or navigation bar, in a common location called a "master page", to be shared by many pages in your site.

In one simple place you can control the look, feel, and much of functionality for an entire Web site. This improves the maintainability of your site and avoids unnecessary duplication of code for shared site structure or behavior.

3) Themes and Skins. The themes and skins features in ASP.NET 2.0 allow for easy customization of your site's look-and-feel. You can define style information in a common location called a "theme", and apply that style information globally to pages or controls in your site. Like Master Pages, this improves the maintainability of your site and avoid unnecessary duplication of code for shared styles.


4) Personalization. Using the new personalization services in ASP.NET 2.0 you can easily create customized experiences within Web applications. The Profile object enables developers to easily build strongly-typed, sticky data stores for user accounts and build highly customized, relationship based experiences. At the same time, a developer can leverage Web Parts and the personalization service to enable Web site visitors to completely control the layout and behavior of the site, with the knowledge that the site is completely customized for them. Personalizaton scenarios are now easier to build than ever before and require significantly less code and effort to implement.


5) Localization. Enabling globalization and localization in Web sites today is difficult, requiring large amounts of custom code and resources. ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 provide tools and infrastructure to easily build Localizable sites including the ability to auto-detect incoming locale's and display the appropriate locale based UI. Visual Studio 2005 includes built-in tools to dynamically generate resource files and localization references. Together, building localized applications becomes a simple and integrated part of the development experience.


6) Administration and Management -- New tools like Configuration API, ASP.NET MMC Admin Tool, Pre-compilation Tool, Health Monitoring and Tracing have been introduced.


Q9. What is precompilation in ASP.NET 2.0? What is a pre-compiled website?

A9. When the first request arrives at your web application there is a mind-numbing amount of work to do. The worker process starts, the runtime initializes, ASPX pages are parsed and compiled to intermediate language, methods are just-in-time compiled to native code - and the list goes on and on. If you want to cut out some of the overhead and improve the startup time of your application, then you’ll want to look at the precompile features in ASP.NET 2.0.

Although pre-compilation will give our site a performance boost, the difference in speed will only be noticeable during the first request to each folder. Perhaps a more important benefit is the new deployment option made available by the precompile - the option to deploy a site without copying any of the original source code to the server. This includes the code and markup in aspx, ascx, and master files.

There are 2 types of pre-compilation:
(i) In Place Precompilation
(ii) Precompilation for Deployment

In Place Precompilation -> By default, ASP.NET dynamically parses and compiles all the ASPX pages in a folder when the first request arrives for a page inside that folder. ASP.NET also needs to compile applicable files in the special folders, like App_Code, on the first request, and any code-behind files associated with ASPX and ASCX files. The runtime caches all the compilation results in order to quickly process later requests, and does not need to recompile again unless someone edits a file. This behavior gives us a great deal of flexibility, including the flexibility to change code and arkup and instantly have the changes reflected in the next browser request.

The price for this flexibility is the performance hit on the first request. Some people have found their ASP.NET applications to be slow starters. These people usually work in the sales department and perform software demos in front of customers. In place pre-compilation makes the “first hit” to a web application and forces all pages and code in the application to compile.

The tool to use for pre-compilation is the aspnet_compiler executable, which you can find in the %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.x.xxxx directory. If we have a web application in the WebSite1 virtual directory under IIS, we could use the following command line to compile the pplication.

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50215>aspnet_compiler -v /Website1

The –v parameter specifies that we are passing a virtual path to our web site. On servers with multiple websites you may need

to use the –m parameter and specify the full IIS metabase path to the application (-m /LM/W3SVC/1/Root/WebSite1).

The pre-compiled code will end up inside of the Temporary ASP.NET File directory, just as it would when the runtime compiles files for a browser request. Inside of the bin directory for the compiled site, you’ll find the assemblies (dll files). The compiler generates special filenames to avoid naming collisions. In the shot below, the dll starting with App_Code contains the code from the App_Code directory – not too surprising. Each folder containing aspx, or ascx files will compile into a dll prefixed with App_Web. The files with a .compiled extension contain XML with information about which original source code file maps to which assembly.

You may find these files in the following location of your computer.
C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files

With the compiled files in place your web application should have a slightly better startup time, but a primary benefit to in place pre-compilation will be the ability to ensure the web application is error free. If you happen to modify a class or web form and leave an error in the file, the aspnet_compiler will fail and display the compiler error. The tool will also display any warnings, but warning will not stop compilation.


Pre-compilation For Deployment --> Pre-compilation for deployment creates an ‘executable’ (no source code) version of your web application. With pre-compilation for deployment you give the aspnet_compiler the path to your source code, and the path to a target directory for the compilation results, like below.

aspnet_compiler -p "C:\MyDevelopment\WebSite1" -v / C:\MyStage