Writing Web Applications Using Visual Basic and ASP.Net

The .Net platform. The Common Language Runtime (CLR) and Intermediate Language. Visual Basic, its alternatives and variations. The Visual Basic environment. Introducing object orientation. Good practice.

The ASP.Net architecture. Creating an ASP.Net page. Code-behind vs inline. Event-driven programming. PostBack and cross page PostBack. ViewState. Standard files and folders. Compile on demand.

Client-side and server-side validation. The Validator controls. Regular expression and custom validators. Validation groups and summaries.

Variable Types, Scope and Lifetime. Nullable types. Arrays.

If, For Next, Do While/Until, For Each, Select Case.

Subroutines and functions. Argument passing mechanisms. Named and optional arguments. Public, Private and the use of modules.

Software engineering and components. Classes, objects and the use of 'New'. Encapsulation. Namespaces and assemblies. Benefits of object orientation.

The use of ‘Overridable’ and ‘Overrides’. Benefits of inheritance. Hiding and Shadows. Abstract classes. Constructors and initialization. Casting. Collection classes. Generics. Collection examples.

Why state is an issue. View, control, session and application state. Cookies. Keeping state across servers. Caching and cache state. web.config and its importance.

The benefits of interfaces. Interfaces vs classes. Defining and implementing an interface. Common interfaces.

Comparison with ‘Err’ and ‘On Error’. Try and Catch. Finally. Custom Exceptions.

Using master pages. The TreeView and Menu controls. Using XML data sources. Site navigation. Other controls. Personalization. Web parts. User profiles. Themes. User Controls.

Connections, commands and readers. DataSets and adapters. Typed DataSets. DataSource controls. Data-aware controls and grids. Stored procedures and transactions. Designing and implementing multi-tier applications.

How LINQ works. Implicitly-typed variables and Lambda expressions. The LINQ syntax. Using LINQ with collections, databases and XML. Parallel LINQ (PLINQ).

Security, authentication and authorization. Credentials and configuration. SSL. Security controls. Membership. Cookieless authentication.

Tracing, monitoring and instrumentation. Error events and pages.

What AJAX is and how it works. The ASP.Net AJAX controls. Related technologies including jQuery and JSON.

Introducing XML. XmlTextReader. Using the Document Object Model (DOM) and XMLDocument. XMLDataDocuments. Creating XML using XmlWriter. LINQ and the ‘X’ classes.

What Silverlight is (and what it isn't). Silverlight site architecture. XAML. Containers, shapes and controls. Designing the user experience. Storyboards and animation. Rendering and transforms. Interaction and code-behind. Images, effects and projections. Exposing Silverlight to JavaScript. Binding.

The .Net Stream architecture. Streams, Readers and Writers. Serialization and SOAP. The Socket and Tcp classes. Basic network communication. Clients and multithreaded servers.

Passing parameters ByVal and ByRef. Variable length parameter lists. Extension methods. Operator overloading. Dispose and Using. Delegates and multicast delegates. Calling Dlls and the Windows API (PInvoke).