I finally finished reading Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C# by Fritz Onion today. It was quick to read, and not too "academic" in its tone. It also described areas of ASP.net that aren't covered by the "pass the Microsoft exam in 2 weeks" style of book, but when I was reading it I thought "I could use that to help with the work I'm doing at the moment."
As I was reading it, I made a list of some enhancements to current projects I'm working on.
I could develop a custom module to add branding to a page. There are some pages that I could cache more intelligently. I hadn't really looked at the tracing capabilities of ASP.net before, but I might try and add some functions to see if there are any performance bottlenecks (and check repeatedly and send me an SMS message using SMS 2 Email) if it gets slower.
I could also use the built in forms-based authentication. I've been using a system that works in much the same way but if it's built in I might as well use the built in version. I'm pleased to see that it supports encrypted passwords with a one-way encryption algorithm that aren't stored on the server.
Hopefully it'll be quiet in the first few days of 2005 and I'll get a chance to add these enhancements and know how to use them when I really need them.
