A full day seminar featuring Miguel Castro from SteelBlue Solutions. This workshop is being coordinated by Dr. Mariam (Fatemeh) Zahedi, Wisconsin Distinguished Professor in the MIS area at the Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

Overview

This workshop will cover three topics related to Microsoft ASP.NET. The WebControl segment will cover the basics of custom server control development, including a dissecting of a couple of Microsoft controls. The Ajax Controls segment will review several of the new controls and extenders in the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit. The third segment will show the proper use of Themes and Skins from beginning to end, including some best practices.

Topics

TOPICS Custom WebControl Development - Understanding what goes on behind the scenes of web controls is important to understanding how to develop those controls. A couple of Microsoft controls will be analyzed to demonstrate the fundamentals of web controls and how they work and to show you the steps taken to write simple rendered controls. You will also see how controls do not sit atop ASP.NET but are, indeed, the heart of its architecture. Finally, we will develop a full-featured composite control leveraging everything covered previously. To this control we will add properties, events, styling, and state management--four basic principles that you will use for any controls you develop in the future. ASP.NET Ajax Controls and Extenders - One of ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkits best features is extenders. Extenders allow the enhancement of existing controls by adding properties and behavior to them. Existing sites can then be enhanced not by swapping out existing controls but rather by adding new controls to partner with existing ones. This segment will take a simple existing site and use a series of ASP.NET Ajax Extenders to enhance the users experience. You will also witness the power of the UpdatePanel—a control that is sure to become your best friend in ASP.NET Ajax. This control allows existing parts of a site to be modified without modifying their code. Understanding Themes and Skins - Today, users are increasingly asking programmers for the ability to customize, personalize, and alter site appearances. Whether this is to be done by the user or by a site developer, site personalization should be accomplished with ease. Style sheets may help, but this segment takes it up a notch with an ASP.NET technology called Themes. Themes is not a replacement for style sheets but partners with them. When used properly, Themes in partnership with style sheets can be a developers ticket to managing site appearance, while at the same time allowing users to personalize their sites by providing them with a set of pre-set looks from which to choose at any time. You’ll get all this plus a few tips, tricks, and best practices for using ASP.NET Themes even in sites where you think you may not need them.

About the speaker

Miguel Castro is a principal consultant and trainer with SteelBlue Solutions. He specializes in building with .NET solutions and teaching it. He is a Microsoft MVP, INETA speaker, conference speaker, and a magazine contributor as well as an active blogger and has been a software developer for over 20 years. His blog and other things of potential interest can be found at http://www.dotnetdude.com.

Who should Attend?

his workshop is for anyone who uses ASP.NET and wants to get a handle on techniques that books may not teach you. This includes: ASP.NET users who want to see how tool vendors, who have long dominated the development of custom web control, did it; Anyone who wants to jump on the Ajax bandwagon and see how the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit works; ASP.NET users who want to learn about Themes technology and the right way to use it.

Coordinator

Dr. Mariam (Fatemeh) Zahedi, Wisconsin Distinguished Professor in the MIS area at the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, will coordinate this workshop.