Datasheet

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Chapter 1: aesthNETics
Don’t misunderstand the scope of this book, though. It does more than outline specific .NET tools
available to you as a web application developer. It shows you sound web design principles and
tools that are not necessarily limited to .NET programs. This includes a discussion of Cascading
Style Sheets and their standards, which are established and maintained by the Worldwide Web
Consortium (W3C). You will also be given an overview of colors, images, and other universally
relevant web design considerations. As the book progresses, though, you will see how to integrate
these philosophies within Visual Studio 2005 and the components offered through the .NET 2.0
Framework. Many of the concepts discussed in this book will not be strictly .NET-specific. The idea
of aesthNETics, though, is focusing and applying those concepts in your .NET applications.
Why Is aesthNETics Important?
You might think of aesthNETics as the presentation layer of a typical n-tier application. Many presen-
tations regarding programming, and this is certainly true of .NET, go into great detail on how to make
websites powerful and inundate them with the latest and greatest technologies. They introduce topics
like AJAX and XML serialization and often go into real-world examples of implementing business logic
into web applications you develop. What most presentations seem to lack, though, is a fair discussion
of the presentation layer. The risk of this mentality is, quite simply, the perpetuation of really powerful
websites that are really powerfully boring to look at.
Does the presentation layer matter? Of course it does. Does it matter as much as the business logic and
data access layers in a typical 3-tier application? Well, that depends on who you ask. At one end of
the spectrum, you might see the seasoned programmer who reads the most current periodicals and
attends technical conferences in an effort to stay on top of the latest technological trends. He might say
‘‘no, it’s not nearly as important.’’ But what about the customers? Sure, they might be appreciative of
a 235-millisecond reduction in access speeds using the new cross-tab functionality of SQL Server 2005.
Or maybe you can wow them with the fact that your Social Security field is validated through regular
expressions and then encrypted in the database. But what do you think they will say if you are telling
them all of this while they are looking at a white page with a couple of text boxes on it? This is often
referred to as the ‘‘halo effect,’’ whereby initial perceptions are used to judge the other properties of
an item. In regard to web design, this means that a potential customer will often make a judgment on
an entire web application according to what they see in the browser in its initial load. If you have lost the
customer before you begin discussing the behind-the-scenes merits, you will have a tough time getting
them back.
To illustrate, assume that you have a client who wants a data dashboard application. They have some
data in a spreadsheet that they first want converted to some sort of Enterprise solution. They then want
to create functionality to automatically import data into the new database on a daily basis. Finally, they
want to present the analysis of the data in a web application viewable on the corporate intranet. This is
a high-profile project with a lot of potential accolades and recognition to the team that delivers the new
system. As a result, two groups compete for the distinction of designing the new system and presenting
it to the Executive Leadership team. The first team spends a lot of time making the data conversions
and creating an automatic update system that should work within the parameters of the project require-
ments. They decide to forego spending much time on the interface of the project and just use some of the
Microsoft Office graphing components to represent the data. They present to management the example
in Figure 1-1.
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