Real World ASP.NET: Building a Content Management System

Real World ASP.NET: Building a Content Management System
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Author	Stephen Fraser
Publisher	APress
Length	552 pages
vbRad Rating:	4 fingers up. (4 out of 5)
Reviewed by	Robert

Content Management Systems are expensive. Commercial ones can run into thousands. One of the great side benefits of this book is that you get a CMS for free. Now, it is true that there are many free CMSs out there, but most of them, like phpNuke, PostNuke, etc… don't run under .NET. Given that we, here, have been threatening to rewrite the site for a while, the book turned out to be a very interesting read.

The first couple of chapters faithfully deal with requirements for a modern CMS. Then, the obligatory "What is .NET" section. Finally, after that, we get to code. The author has nicely laid out the building process - we start with a small task, progressing little by little until we have most of the functionality. The CMS in this book uses (and thus you'll learn and have to deal with) the following technologies:

C#
ASP.NET
ADO.NET
XML (actually just for keeping preferences for the web site)
Security (authentication, encryption, etc…). This particular topic is useful for a lot of other types of web sites

The author also spends a fair amount of time on personalization. This is a science of remembering your name when you visit the web site.

Anyway, if you own a web site or work for one, this book should be on your bookshelf. Oh, and don't forget that you'll get a free CMS out of it.

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