Ged Mead
Ged Mead (XTab) has been around computers since the 1980's when the first affordable home computers came on the market. His journey from that very first Dragon 32 to the present has taken him through many different facets of the IT Industry. These include formal training as a Systems Analyst, employment in a mainframe software development environment, and a short time spent demonstrating rugged military IT systems in the days when it took two strong men to carry a 'mobile' system.
His most rewarding challenge was the creation of a financial management system for a large organisation.
Now based in an idyllic lochside location in the West of Scotland, he is currently involved in a range of development projects, whenever he can drag his gaze away from the stunning surrounding views, that is!
Ged is a Microsoft MVP, Senior Editor for DevCity.NET, vbCity Developer Community Leader and Admin, Helper of the Month competition winner and DevCity.NET newsletter Editor.
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Who would have thought that a 350 page book that probably contains less than 100 lines of .NET code would be useful? Surprisingly perhaps, to many people this book will be very helpful because it fills a very useful purpose in a particular niche market.
One of the much heralded advantages of ASP.NET 2.0 and the newly minted free editions of VS2005 is that the amount of code required to produce useful, usable basic applications has been dramatically reduced. In the case of ASP.NET 2.0 the figure of 70% reduction has often been bandied about as the target. Whatever the actual final figure turned out to be, one thing is true - you can drag and drop items from a whole mountain of new and easy-to-use features via the Visual Web developer 2005 Express Edition (VWD for short) and create limited but functional starter applications with almost no code of your own.
And it is this ability upon which the book is based. It homes in on those built-in features that enable complete novices to create basic websites. It covers all the basics, including Master Pages, CSS Styles, Themes, Navigation, validation, some of the ASP.NET controls, and a short SQL Server crash course.
Two CDs are bundled with the book. The first contains a copy of VWD itself, which seems now to be a fairly standard feature for 2005 books. The second CD contains a range of video tutorials from the LearnVisualStudioNet site plus some useful links to videos from Wintellect and various other online resources.