ShankuN's Blog

The Online Weblog of Shanku Niyogi, ASP.NET Group Program Manager

ASP.NET Whidbey Starter Kit Guidelines

This month, we're putting together the overall plan and guidelines for Starter Kits for ASP.NET Whidbey. Jeff King (Scott's PDC keynote demo buddy) is managing the overall Starter Kit plan for our team, and has been putting together some samples. Over the next few months, I'll use this blog to share some of the starter kit designs and ideas with you, and get your feedback. If you have any ideas at any time, feel free to shout!

Like V1, the aim of the starter kits is to have real world applications that work “out of the box”, but are easy and tempting to customize.  The first step is to put together a set of guidelines for consistency that apply to any starter kit; we'll then use these guidelines to create specs for each specific starter kit as we develop them. We'll also provide these guidelines for those in the community building projects that look like starter kits.

As you may or may not know, in Whidbey many groups in VS are shipping similar starter kits. One big goal of the starter kits in Whidbey is that you can install them into Visual Studio, and have them appear in File/New - in our case from the File/New Web Site menu item. We will then ship a set of starter kits right in Visual Studio. Of course, we will continue to provide them for free over the web, and we'll also use the web to provide updates for the VS starter kits.

Here is an outline of some of the current common requirements for ASP.NET Starter Kits:

Client IE6, Netscape 7 (in Beta 1)
Opera 7, Safari 1.2 (in Beta 2)
Hosting All kits will be maximally functional under shared hosting under partial trust.
Common Look/Feel All common elements between pages on a site must be in master pages.
Kits need to implement one theme and be easily customizable using themes.
Membership Kits will use forms authentication, using the membership system, whenever possible and relevant.
Windows authentication will only be the default for intranet-based Kits.
Navigation Site navigation should be easy to use, and use the sitemap feature whenever possible.
Data Will support XCopy deployment, but also have scripts to install the kit on a SQL server.
Localization All sites will be localized into the standard VS languages.
Sites that include scenarios for end-user localization should use the ASP.NET localization features in Whidbey.
Administration All kits can be administered using the Web Administration tool in Whidbey.
XHTML Validation All kits will pass XHTML 1.1 validation from the W3C site.
Accessibility All sites will be ADA508 conformant.
Programming Languages VB, C#, J#

What do you think? Anything you disagree with, or would suggest adding (or removing)?

Posted: Feb 22 2004, 08:52 PM by ShankuN | with 15 comment(s)
Filed under: ,

Comments

Anonymous said:

Seems like Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox should be inlcuded as a target client.
# February 23, 2004 1:03 AM

Tommi said:

I'd agree with the anonymous comment: Mozilla + Firefox should be included, unless it is allready covered with the Netscape 7 meantioned (all of them use same Gecko engine, right?).
# February 23, 2004 4:26 AM

Joe90 said:

It will be nice to be able to test out the XHTML and accessibility compliancy out of the box. First impressions last ect.

# February 23, 2004 6:13 AM

TrackBack said:

# February 23, 2004 9:42 AM

J. Daniel Smith said:

Please make things work "out of the box" without SQL or MSDE. Using Access/JET or XML makes is so much easier to deploy a "Starter Kit" solution on (low-cost) ASP.NET hosts.
# February 23, 2004 10:03 AM

Shanku Niyogi said:

Yes, we'll use Netscape to indirectly test Mozilla for the starter kits.

For ASP.NET product development itself, we have a whole plan for how we pick and prioritize browsers - good topic for another post. :)
# February 23, 2004 10:12 AM

Chris Kinsman said:

Dump J# and put more effort into completeness.

Don't assume due to the hostability requirement that you should exlude SQL Server.
# February 23, 2004 12:32 PM

Erik Sargent said:

1> The SQL scripts and any database access should be able to run in non-SA context. I know this sounds stupid, but we have several vendors who require us to run as SA either for install, or in one case, even at runtime!

2> I don't see the need to put out all Starter Kits in all languages, especially J#. If it were a question of 8 Kits in all three languages or 12 Kits in just C# and VB.NET, I would certainly choose the 12. Maybe you could do a few in J#, but even our Java programers prefer C# to J# when they are doing .NET.

If you insist on J# maybe you should do one in COBOL.NET and/or Eiffel. Seriously - I don't mean this as a smartalec comment. There would be some value to MS for this in that it "proves" that these other languages are fully functional in the .NET framework. I'm sure your ISVs would love to help.

3> Most importantly, you should ship either NUnit or CSunit test suites with each of them, so that as we modify code we can maintain integrity going forward. I'd be partial to NUnit because it has the NUnitASP extensions, but CSunit is a very nice application too. (P.S. James Fowler is working for MS now. I'm sure he'd be glad to give some insight on NUnit)
# February 23, 2004 1:02 PM

Sean Terry said:

"All kits will pass XHTML 1.1 validation from the W3C site."
"All sites will be ADA508 conformant."

THANK YOU! XOXOXO

I'll believe it when I see it, though.
# February 23, 2004 3:23 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 23, 2004 7:08 PM

Anonymous said:

What media type (MIME type) will you be using for the XHTML 1.1 documents? If you send them as text/html you're not following the spec, but if you send them as application/xhtml+xml (according to spec), they won't be viewable in Internet Explorer. (This is a bug in IE that should've been fixed ages ago.)
# March 22, 2004 8:14 PM

David Brockmeier said:

I agree with everything Erik Sargent said in his post, plus:

It would be a greater service to the community to focus on projects of differing *complexity* more than differing functionality. In other words, I'd much rather see a simple, a moderate, and a complex project rather than several kits with the same approach but different functionality. Please use a variety of design patterns, and don't play every single kit to the lowest common denominator. Diagrams and documentation of design are more useful than additional kits.
# July 29, 2004 8:27 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 19, 2004 10:19 AM

TrackBack said:

^_^,Pretty Good!
# April 10, 2005 9:50 AM

Zaif said:

I want 2 get some ASP.Net Starter Kit

# May 31, 2007 1:13 AM
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