Active Server Pages Plus

In a departure from its usual doorstop tomes, Wrox has produced this slim volume that runs to just 361 pages, and the giveaway is in the full title: A Preview of Active Server Pages+. Perhaps one of the reasons this preview is so short is that Microsoft hadn't actually released the first preview version of ASP+ when it was written, so what you get is more of a general overview of the technology.

There are explanations of what ASP+ is and how it will differ from ASP, introductions to concepts such as using Web services to provide asynchronous background services to applications, and discussions on migrating from ASP to ASP+. There are also the usual host of errors and wrong guesses, as you might expect in the circumstances. To be fair, the Wrox Web site has identified most of these and has all the details needed to put matters straight, but it would have been better to wait a while to get a fully comprehensive book without them. For instance, it's confusing that the book refers to COM+ 2 and the Web Services Platform when the world now knows these things as the Microsoft .NET Framework. The book also says 'execution engine'; Microsoft says 'common language run-time', and so on. Of more concern, as is increasingly commonplace, it seems, are the code sample errors. A visibleItems attribute shown as rows here, an ADOCommand replaced by a SQLCommand there.

Interestingly, the book was handed out at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Orlando when the first tech previews of ASP+ and Visual Studio .NET were distributed. As documentation for the tech preview it would certainly serve a useful purpose, but now a few months further down the line it doesn't seem to have a niche to fill any more. Indeed, the excellent Wrox-backed ASPToday Web site (www.asptoday.com) has more than enough information to keep any developer interested, and what's more it's far more up to date than the preview book. As ASPToday has recognisable and respectable names doing the writing, we can't think of any reason to buy the book rather than just using your browser.

Author: Davey Winder