Experience gained from writing an ASP.NET application
I have just amazed my boss by producing a small ASP.NET application in just over a day. Naturally, whilst developing the application I learnt some good lessons which I think are worth sharing.
The application displays information on the status of helpdesk calls. One of the services we provide is an outsourced helpdesk to a number of companies. The user of the application should only be able to view the reports they are permitted to see. This means that the user must be first authenticated and then a check must be made to see which information they are authorized to view. In addition it was important that the user could filter and sort the data displayed. There was also a requirement for the some statistics to be displayed in a dynamically generated bar chart. In addition all the data is stored in a SQL Server database.
I decided that the first thing to do was to see what code samples I could find on the web. For security I found this excellent article on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/SecNetHT03.asp
When writing the sorting, paging and filtering code I found this article very useful :http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnnews/2001/sept/Sorting/Sorting.asp
In terms of drawing the bar chart I found this article helped a lot :http://www.fawcette.com/vsm/2001_12/online/online_eprods/jgoodyear/default_pf.asp
In addition excellent resources like http://www.codeproject.com and CODE magazine http://www.code-magazine.com/ allowed me to create a visually appealing application very quickly. Of course I should not forget the Microsoft developers who built ASP.NET and the .Net Framework.
In my next post I will describe some of the lessons I learnt and give some tips.