Scott Millett

Building Layered Web Applications with Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0

scott@elbandit.co.uk — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:59:00 GMT

Building Layered Web Applications with Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
An excellent introduction for beginners showing the fundamentals involved in architecting an application using the Custom Business Entities approach. Written by Wrox author, Imar Spaanjaars.

For more information on the designing the architecture for your ASP.net application check out the ASP.net Architecture forum and the Architecture Wiki entry on ASP.net.

ASP.net Books

scott@elbandit.co.uk — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:36:00 GMT

Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 by O AL Zabir

This book will teach you how to build an ASP.net Ajax enabled portal, you can view it here: http://www.dropthings.com/.

Sample Enterprise ASP.net Applications

scott@elbandit.co.uk — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:32:00 GMT

Some open source enterprise applications that I have found useful:

Microsoft .NET Pet Shop 4 - The .NET Pet Shop application is designed to show the best practices for building enterprise, n-tier .NET 2.0 applications that may need to support a variety of database platforms and deployment scenarios.
http://www.dinnernow.net/ - DinnerNow is a fictitious marketplace where customers can order food from local restaurants for delivery to their home or office. This sample is designed to demonstrate how you can develop a connected application using several new Microsoft technologies.
The demo utilizes several technologies including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, LINQ, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows PowerShell, and the .NET Compact Framework.
.NET StockTrader Sample Application - This application is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET, and illustrates many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. It is designed as a benchmark kit to illustrate alternative technologies within .NET and their relative performance.

Another good source of application design can be found on the ASP.net starter kits applications page.

Avoiding using Try & Catch when setting drop down list selected value

scott@elbandit.co.uk — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:20:00 GMT

A better way to avoid errors when setting the selected item of a drop down list which avoids using a Try and Catch statment is to change:

Try
         Me.ddlCountry.Items.FindByValue(Profile.Customer.CountryID).Selected = True
Catch ex As Exception
         ' Select the default country
         Me.ddlCountry.Items(1).Selected = True
End Try

To this:

Dim ddlItem As ListItem
ddlItem = ddlCountry.Items.FindByValue(Profile.Customer.CountryID)

If Not ddlItem Is Nothing Then
ddlItem.Selected = True
Else
' Set a default
End If

Thanks to Eric Wise for that! :0)

Storing the UserID instead of the UserName in the User.Identity.Name Object when using the Login Control and MemberShip API

scott@elbandit.co.uk — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:22:00 GMT

The problem I had wiith using the Membership API and the login Control was that by default after logging in the User.Identity.Name is set to the username that users logon with, and this is usually a string value i.e. their email address or username.

I wanted to store the user id in the User.Identity.Name varaible, this is how I acheieved it using the Membership Login Control:

Imports System.Web.Security
Imports System.Web.UI.WebControls
Imports MySite.BusinessFacade

Partial Class MembersArea_CustomerLogin
    Inherits System.Web.UI.Page

    Protected Sub Login1_LoggedIn(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _
              Handles Login1.LoggedIn

              Dim lngUserID As Long
              ' The UserFacade is the interface into my business layer
              Dim aUserFacade As New UserFacade
              ' This method simply returns the UserID of the user that has just been
              ' logged in. We get the Username from the login control text box.
              lngUserID = aUserFacade.getUserID(Login1.UserName)

              ' Now that we have got the UserID we need to recreate the
              ' authentication ticket we removed earlier otherwise
              ' the user will not be authenticated.
              Dim authTicket As FormsAuthenticationTicket = _
                            New FormsAuthenticationTicket(lngUserID , False, 30)

Dim encryptedTicket As String = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(authTicket)

Dim authCookie As HttpCookie = _
New HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, encryptedTicket)

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Add(authCookie)
End Sub

End Class

Now we can access the UserID where ever we want.

Dim aCustomerFacade As New CustomerFacade
Dim allProjects As List(Of Projects)

allProjects = aUserFacade.GetAllProjects(CType(User.Identity.Name, Long))