What's New in ASP.NET 2.0
Written by Eric Smith, Northstar Computer Systems LLC
If you're looking for good information on what is new in 2.0, <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/00/ASPNET20Overview/default.aspx" class='text'>this article</a> has a good summary of all the main features. Learning new technology always needs a starting point, and this looks like a good place to start. There are a number of the features in this article that look promising for some of my sites.
Master Pages are really cool and have a lot of untapped potential. I've already got a working example where I have more than one master page "inheriting" from another. While the visual designer doesn't quite understand it, it renders exactly as I intended.
There are also some interesting things in the Membership Service and Login Controls that might be helpful. I've always been one to do-it-myself in this sort of stuff, but having an API that I can tie into may be a good transition from DIY to letting the code do more of the work for me.
One last feature at the bottom of the article -- encrypted connection strings. The Data Protection API (DPAPI) has been around a long time, but because there was no .NET wrapper, you were on your own to wire it into your code. However, it looks like the aspnet_regiis utility can encrypt and decrypt connection strings (or any other config section) on the machine. DPAPI is specific to the machine where the data lives, so if you move the encrypted file to another server, you can't decrypt it. In addition, any code on the server uses the same decryption algorithm, which in theory would allow any code with access to your file to decrypt it. It would take some work and some major security lapses for this to happen, but in spite of that, DPAPI is a handy thing to be able to use. It also looks like the encryption can use RSA public/private key encryption techniques too, so that may be a good solution if you're looking to encrypt data on multiple servers and manage the keys centrally.
Keywords: [
ASP.NET Features
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Publication Date: 3/1/2006, Last Update: 3/22/2010
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