ASP.NET Experience

I do most of my web development work in ASP.NET. I've mastered ASP.NET 1.1 and now I am working on improving my knowledge of ASP.NET 2.0. I've read three books on ASP.NET 2.0 and have a good grasp of the new features but I still plan to gain in-depth expertise on web parts, AJAX, and membership and personalization. I am currently working on upgrading a large web application to ASP.NET 2.0 and that should give me plenty of practical experience. Microsoft will soon release ASP.NET 3.5 and I hope to start learning that soon. I do most of my work in Visual Studio 2003 but I've really mastered Visual Studio 2005 because I explored every feature in an attempt to understand a large application which was poorly documented. Visual Studio 2008 will soon be released.

Web Parts

Web Parts is a new technology introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. Web parts are great for creating mash up sites because they allow you to drag and drop sections of a web application onto a web page. A web part site allows the user to pick and choose the content from a collection of web parts which each have their own functionality. Unfortunately, web part technology is not being used much because the page needs to reload too often. This can be overcome using AJAX but there have not been many tutorials or demonstrations on how to do that. I am currently working through some innovations on web parts to make it more useful for business web applications.

AJAX

Microsoft has provided AJAX Extensions for ASP.NET 2.0 and there will be built-in support for AJAX in ASP.NET 3.5. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) has become a very popular technology for use in web applications because it eliminates the need for frequently reloading the web page in the browser to update data. I've used AJAX in a few ASP.NET 1.1 projects and in connection with widgets which use AJAX to retrieve their data. I plan to expand my knowledge of the AJAX Extensions which requires learning how to use a large number of web controls.

Membership Personalization

Every web application needs to maintain a table of users and provide a means of allowing authorized users to log in. ASP.NET 2.0 now provides a standard set of web controls to manage the login process and a standard database schema for collecting user profile information. Unortunately it does not provide a standard set of web pages for managing user accounts so that is something I need to work on. User membership and user profiles are important aspects of social networking web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 provides much of the framework for this functionality.