Chapter 14

This chapter shows how talented the author of the book is. He takes a simple task, making thumbnails of pictures available on a website, and uses that as a seemingly easy premise for you to learn some unusually difficult tasks. In this way you don't get intimidated by the difficult things, he gives you perspective and a goal, and because of this things are really easy to learn.

This section shows how to upload data to a website and work with that data. Specifically image files, but they could be anything because you use an upload controller then add other controls that check for the file type. The other really cool thing that I noticed is that asp.net sets up and uses variables with its controls that can be passed around very easily. I don't have to do all the work like I did with java to specify variables to be used. This functionality is by control, so any control that may pass a variable has a default variable set up just in case you want to use it.

Other than the simple tasks of uploading data this section got into formatting images, again, which isn't too difficult. It also showed a function of asp.net that does auto-thumbnailing, i guess you would call it. It can take any .jpeg or .gif file and automatically format it to a thumbnail. Because of the variable functionality of controls, you can pass the information around easily and run the toThumbnail function on it and put the thumbnail on the page where u want.

Pretty cool.