Hello everybody, and welcome to my blog! My name is Marco Bellinaso, and some of you may recognize me as one of the authors for a number of Wrox Press books, among which is ASP.NET Website Programming. I've written some articles on online and print programming magazine such as MSDN Magazine, MSDN Online, Visual Studio Magazine and ASP Today. Besides teaching how to write code, I do actually write some real code, and you find some examples in the commercial tools and products listed here on the site: Form Maximizer, CodeBox, VBMaximizer and MB ActiveX Gallery. My main area of expertise is web programming with ASP.NET and related technologies (including SharePoint 2003 (WSS and Portal), SQL Server, Enterprise Services, scripting and more), but I don't snob Windows Forms programming...when strictly required . I've also written most of the engine that runs the .Net2TheMax site...so while Francesco takes care of most of the content updates, I'm the one to blame if you get unexpected errors or other problems with the site (ehm...I really hope that's not the case ). Community-related works apart, I'm a senior developer, consultant and teacher for Code Architects Srl, an Italian firm founded by Francesco Balena and Giuseppe Dimauro, the two Microsoft RDs for Italy.

Currently, my principal occupation is finishing my new book, i.e. Wrox's ASP.NET Website Programming version 2.0. This time the book is a solo project, and I'm rewriting it completely from scratch. The general approach (Problem - Design - Solution) is quite the same, but 100% of the code is pure .NET 2.0. The solution is now much more integrated, functional and feature-rich than the first edition, and the sample site being built is actually a real-world site that you may sell to customers nearly as-is. A big difference from the previous book is that I'll set apart much more pages for introducing new ASP.NET 2.0 features such as master pages, themes, membership, navigation controls, new binding controls, web parts, localization etc. Right now I'm finishing the code for the Forums module, and very complete modules for managing users, articles, photo galleries, polls and newsletters are already there. In the next days I'll start to post more details about the sample site, and some significant screenshots. In my plan the site will be released publicly, and I will continue to support it after the book is published. I hope it will make a great example for web developers (new and not-so-new)...but I'll leave it to you to judge the code and the book.

Besides keeping you updated about the book's progress status, I want to post tips & tricks I discover during the development, bugs & problems with the framework (a very very rare circumstance, hopefully), and opinions about the developer-world in general. From time to time I also plan to use this space to ask for your opinions and suggestions about the design, implementation and usefulness of ideas and projects I work on. What? This will make it an egoistic blog? Well, I'll try to keep it balanced.