Scott Millett

Building Layered Web Applications with Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0

Building Layered Web Applications with Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
An excellent introduction for beginners showing the fundamentals involved in architecting an application using the Custom Business Entities approach. Written by Wrox author, Imar Spaanjaars.

For more information on the designing the architecture for your ASP.net application check out the ASP.net Architecture forum and the Architecture Wiki entry on ASP.net.

ASP.net Books

Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 by O AL Zabir

This book will teach you how to build an ASP.net Ajax enabled portal, you can view it here: http://www.dropthings.com/.

Sample Enterprise ASP.net Applications

Some open source enterprise applications that I have found useful:

• Microsoft .NET Pet Shop 4 - The .NET Pet Shop application is designed to show the best practices for building enterprise, n-tier .NET 2.0 applications that may need to support a variety of database platforms and deployment scenarios.
  
• http://www.dinnernow.net/ - DinnerNow is a fictitious marketplace where customers can order food from local restaurants for delivery to their home or office. This sample is designed to demonstrate how you can develop a connected application using several new Microsoft technologies.
  The demo utilizes several technologies including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, LINQ, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows PowerShell, and the .NET Compact Framework.
  
• .NET StockTrader Sample Application - This application is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET, and illustrates many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. It is designed as a benchmark kit to illustrate alternative technologies within .NET and their relative performance. 
  

Another good source of application design can be found on the ASP.net starter kits applications page.

Avoiding using Try & Catch when setting drop down list selected value

A better way to avoid errors when setting the selected item of a drop down list which avoids using a Try and Catch statment is to change:

Try
         Me.ddlCountry.Items.FindByValue(Profile.Customer.CountryID).Selected = True
Catch ex As Exception
         ' Select the default country
         Me.ddlCountry.Items(1).Selected = True
End Try