As a server-side control, ScriptManager reacts to events in the ASP.NET page lifecycle and uses those events to coordinate the activities of all the controls, options, and code employed by ASP.NET AJAX. ScriptManager will hook a particular event, get notified when it occurs, and configure a few settings depending on the environment; this process will repeat itself several times through the rendering cycle of your ASP.NET page. The settings it configures, however, are often the exact settings needed to make your use of ASP.NET AJAX seamless.
I will first go over a few of the main features of ASP.NET AJAX that the ScriptManager control enables for you, and then begin an exploration of the lifecycle of the control on the server. By understanding the internals of ScriptManager, you will gain a deeper appreciation for the options it provides for Web application development and learn how to get the most out of it.

I'd learned several best practices that I applied when working on my desktop apps. Two of them were:
* Separation of concerns: don't mix UI logic with underlying behavior.
* Automated unit testing: write automated tests that verify whether your code does what you think it does.

The underlying principles here apply regardless of technology. Separation of concerns is a fundamental principle that exists to help you deal with complexity. Mixing Different responsibilities within the same object—like calculating remaining work hours, formatting data, and drawing a graph—is just asking for maintenance problems. And automated testing is crucial to getting production-quality code while still maintaining your sanity, particularly when you're updating an existing project. ASP.NET Web Forms made it very easy to get started, but, in other ways, trying to apply my design principles to Web apps was a struggle. Web Forms are relentlessly UI focused; the fundamental atom is the page. You start by designing your UI and dragging controls. It's very seductive to just start slapping your application logic into the page's event handlers

Stephen Walther builds an entire ASP.NET MVC application from start to finish. This tutorial is a great introduction for people who are new to the ASP.NET MVC Framework and who want to get a sense of the process of building an ASP.NET MVC application.

ADO.NET Data Services and Silverlight make a powerful combination, but to make them work well together, there are a few things you need to understand.

Using the new DLR features in .NET 4 you can build a configuration-free ORM that uses the normal object-dot-property syntax without interfaces to define, classes to implement, or XML data mapping.

A .NET software component is a compiled set of classes that provide a programmable interface that is used by consumer applications for a service. As a component is no more than a logical grouping of classes, what then is the best way to define the boundaries of a component within the .NET framework? How should the classes inter-operate?

OS contains a number of controls and classes that help you considerably when building applications. The user interface elements range from the buttons and labels we have already seen, to sliders, progress views, and paging controls—to name just a few. There are also classes to abstract various system capabilities, such as playing music and sending email. In this article, we’ll survey several of the more common classes you’ll use when building applications.

This article discusses two more common attacks to help round out our arsenal of application protections—cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF).

A common “best practice” for unit tests is to only write a one assertion in each test. I intend to question this advice by showing that multiple assertions per test are both necessary and beneficial.

ASP.NET AJAX can make canceling remote operations really easy, but there are two restrictions. First, the task must have been started using UpdatePanel. Second, no extra work should be required on the server to compensate for the abrupt interruption of the task.