Introducing web portals and Dropthings.com -- Architecting the web portal and widgets -- Building the web layer using ASP.NET AJAX -- Building the data and business layers using .NET 3.5 -- Building client-side widgets -- Optimizing ASP.NET AJAX -- Creating asynchronous, transactional, cache-friendly web services -- Improving server-side performance and scalability -- Improving client-side performance -- Solving common deployment, hosting, and production challenges.