Chapter Overview

Each chapter starts by showing the user experience we are going to create in the chapter. It then has a section discussing the major design decisions we face in building these features, and finally presents the "solution" – including the overall architecture and highlighting the most important code elements.

Content and Purpose

The book presents a lot of real-world code, with comprehensive explanation and discussion. The full social network application is available for download from the Packt website, for you to examine, study, and modify.

Target Audience

This book is written for ASP.NET and C# developers who want to build an enterprise-grade Social Network, either for their own business purposes or as a contract job for another company. The book assumes you have prior experience of developing web applications using ASP.NET 3.5, C# 3.0, SQL Server 2005/2008, and Visual Studio .NET 2008; it focuses on topics that will be of interest to existing developers – not on providing step-by-step examples for each detail.