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I just came home from the Dutch Microsoft Developer Days in Amsterdam. I visited a lot of interesting talks, including one on Atlas by Scott Guthrie and one on LINQ by Erik Meijer.

I also visited a session called "ADO.NET 2.0: Base classes, factories, and schemas and tracing" by Bob Beauchemin where he showed an interesting Trace feature for ADO.NET (besides a whole lot of other interesting stuff on ADO.NET 2.0).

As a web developer and consultant, I am often involved in the upgrade or redesign process of existing web sites. Clients have had a site for a couple of years, and are now ready for something bigger, better or more feature rich. They approach the company I work for (Design IT) for a new web site. Upgrading (or even maintaining) these sites is often not an easy task, especially when they have been built with Dreamweaver and its Templates and Library features.

While in itself these features can be very useful, and allow you to create a consistent looking web site with little work, these features often make it hard to upgrade the web site. In this short article, I show you the common pitfalls with templates and library items, and show you a better alternative. While this article uses ASP for any sample code, the concepts also apply to other programming languages and web servers that support server side includes.

Update!! 05/03/2006
A while ago, Microsoft released the full source of the Built-in ASP.NET 2.0 Providers. Downloading the source is highly recommended if you want to create your own (or customize existing) providers. You can find more detail here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/13/442772.aspx.

This is the fourth part of a (long running) article series about migrating a .NET 1.x Web site to ASP.NET 2. This installment focuses on custom providers for the Membership and Role management features found in the .NET Framework. While out of the box these features make it very easy to implement security in a new site you build, you can't use them directly in existing web sites that already implemented a custom security mechanism.

This is the third part of a (long running) article series about migrating a .NET 1.1 Web site to ASP.NET 2.0. This installment focuses on the way I migrated my business logic, content pages and user controls.