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Social sites may have the spotlight at the moment, but online shopping sites have held an important place in the Internet economy for years. With electronic commerce so vital, it shouldn't be surprising that ASP.NET offers a useful framework, dubbed ASP.NET AJAX, to help you build such a site. This article, the first of eleven parts, starts you off on a step-by-step journey to building the e-commerce site of your dreams.

Visual Studio 2005 introduced a number of tools that allow web developers to create dynamic web pages more easily than ever. The GridView encapsulates most of the functionality needed for displaying and editing tabular data efficiently, and can bind to several types of data sources. The DetailsView is a sibling to the GridView, supporting most of the same functionality but displaying a single record at a time. While these controls can bind to databases through simple DataSets and SqlDataSources, the ObjectDataSource control provides a more clearly defined, more sophisticated -- but potentially more complicated -- connection. For developers looking to model their SQL data within the application through custom classes, the ObjectDataSource allows them to bind their strongly-typed classes to user controls and add a discrete Business Logic Layer to ensure user interactions follow defined rules of behavior.

The other week I was surfing the web and I came across something that perked my interest, and this article is kind of a result of what I found. Basically, I come from a database type of background, so am used to seeing forms with grids, list and listviews which were functional, but looked pretty boring. This is kind of why I like WPF so much, as you can make functional apps, but make them look really sexy. Anyone that has done any WPF will probably know, that there are a couple of data type controls, such a ListBox and a ListView, and with some clever binding and some templating/styling we could probably make these look like a grid. But the truth is that there simply is no DataGrid or anything like that.

This article demonstrates what LINQ to SQL is and how to use its basic functionality.

Dino Esposito talk in this article about the cool new features you can find in ASP.Net Extensions 3.5, the so awaited history and back/forward in Ajax.

In Microsoft .NET you have two types of security, Code Access Security and Role Based Security. In this article we will explore what the latter implies, how it can be used, etc. So, what is Code Access Security then? Code Access Security (CAS) is a security feature of .NET that enables the code that is to be executed to be properly verified and different levels of trust granted accordingly. It actually provides the flexibility to define what the code could perform and what not to perform. This article discusses CAS, the functions and benefits of CAS, permissions and permission sets.

Web services provide a great way to exchange data between ASP.NET AJAX pages and a server using lightweight JSON messages (see my previous articles for examples of integrating Web services into ASP.NET AJAX applications). However, creating a separate .ASMX Web service file and adding the ScriptService attribute to the service class may feel like overkill in situations where a single page consumes the service's methods. In some cases, it's more convenient to simply add the functionality provided by the Web service directly into an ASP.NET code-beside page. In these cases, ASP.NET AJAX page methods can be used instead of Web Services.

However, each time a user logs in to your application, a postback operation occurs which, in some situations, may not be desirable. In cases where you'd like to log users into a Web site without performing a complete postback of a page, you can use the ASP.NET AJAX authentication service instead.