About this book

Over the past few years you will have likely noticed the rise and rise of web portals and seen the impact that they are having on the way that we use the Web. Portals such as Sharepoint, Live.com, Google, and DotNetNuke have transformed the way that we consume our daily information. Regardless of whether or not you are new to portals or an old hand with them, this book will provide you with all that you need to know to start building them.

This book is unlike many other popular ASP.NET books in that it focuses solely on teaching you how to use the web parts and portal framework features of ASP.NET 2.0 to build portal applications. By removing unnecessary details of other parts of ASP.NET and reducing the amount of information that there is to consume we can view portal creation in a very clear and concise manner.

Road map

This book is divided into two parts and is designed to guide you from the very first moment that you start using the portal framework right up to the point where you need to design and build a portal for an enterprise scenario.

The first part of the book spans chapter 1 through 6 where, after an introduction to ASP.NET 2.0, you will learn about the core APIs of the portal framework. In these chapters we will be rolling up our sleeves and pulling these APIs apart as we learn how to customize, extend, and secure our portal through code and configuration settings. It’s here that you will learn about the very nature of each of the parts in the portal framework.

Chapter 1 serves as a high level introduction to ASP.NET 2.0 and offers a glimpse into some of the terminology of portals. In this chapter we will also learn about the fictional Adventure Works business which will serve as the example business for which we will be building a portal throughout the remainder of the book.

In chapter 2 we will look at web parts—the useful little units that allow us to add content to a portal. It is in this chapter that we will build our very first basic portal. By the end of the chapter we will be up and running and will familiar with the APIs surrounding web parts and also learn about web part internals when we use interfaces within the portal framework to customize the behaviour of our web parts.

In the third chapter of the book we will delve into the world of web part connections and learn how to connect web parts using transformers and connections to increase the value of data and empower users to use data to suit their own unique needs.

Chapter 4 is possibly the most important chapter in the book as this is where we learn about the web part manager. Here I’ll show you what role the web part manager plays in orchestrating the runtime behaviour of the portal. Again, we’ll be diving in under the covers so that we can learn how to customize this control to provide just the behaviour that we need. For example, we will see how to write code in our very own custom web part manager that checks each web part on every page to check whether the user has permission to view each part.

After learning about the web part manager, we’ll turn to chapter 5 where we learn about the important topic of zones. On the surface, zones appear as inanimate objects in the world of portals, but by the time we’ve pulled them apart, you’ll see that zones play an important role in how web parts are rendered and provide us with the perfect way to customize the look and feel of all web parts in our portal, as well as create a unique and engaging place for visitors to our site.

If chapter 4 was the most important chapter, then chapter 6 is certainly the second most important one because this is where we get our hands dirty playing with personalization. Given that users place such high importance on the ability to customize and personalize their portals to create their own unique spaces, personalization is a very important topic indeed. In this chapter we will learn about the key extensibility points of the personalization system that we must use to give our portals that special edge!

The second part of the book begins with chapter 7. By now you’ve learned about the core APIs in the framework. Prior to this chapter, we’ve read a lot of the theory of portals and put it into practice with small prototypes, but now it’s time to learn the special art of portals. You’ll master how to mix each of the things that you’ve learned thus far into a recipe that will help you to produce portals that are not only highly customized but portals that users also enjoy using. We’ll do this by looking at some of the common customizations that are applied to modern portals and seeing how to apply them to our own portal. Some of these customizations include the collapsible/expandable editor that we create in chapter 7, as well as the feature we will implement in chapter 8 that is similar to the data versioning that comes as a standard feature in Sharepoint 2007. You’ll also learn how to mix server-side and client-side code in chapter 8 when we create a cool pop-up catalog zone dialog.

By chapter 9 our portal is nearing feature completeness and the only thing that remains is to deploy what we have created so that our users can start using it. I won’t bore you with information about configuring web servers and copying files. Instead we’ll take a different approach to deployment, learning how to instrument code and more about health monitoring. Learning these important lessons will give us visibility over the health of our portal when it is no longer under our direct control.

In the last chapter we take a look back at what we’ve learned; and then we turn around to view the possible future of our little portal. By looking at Atlas technology we will gain an understanding of how XML and JavaScript can combine to improve the responsiveness of web applications across the board.

Finally, the appendix shows how to create an ASP.NET web project in Visual Studio 2005. This web project forms the basis for the web portal that we will be building throughout the book.

I fully expect that the little journey I have planned for you in this book will be both insightful and engaging. After reading this book you will be well on your way to having full control over the design and behaviour of your portals and you will be confident that users of your portals will have a great place to start their daily web activities!

Source code

All source code in listings or in text is in a fixed-width font like this to separate it from ordinary text. In some cases, the original source code has been reformatted: we’ve added line breaks and reworked indentation to accommodate the available page space in the book. In rare cases even this was not enough, and listings include line-continuation markers. Code annotations accompany many of the listings, highlighting important concepts. Bolding in code listings is used for emphasis as well.

The source code for all of the examples in this book as well as for the web project can be downloaded from the publisher’s website at www.manning.com/neimke.

Author Online

Your purchase of ASP.NET 2.0 in Action includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications, where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and from other users. To access the forum and subscribe to it, point your web browser to www.manning.com/neimke. This page provides information on how to get on the forum once you are registered, what kind of help is available, and the rules of conduct on the forum.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue among individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the AO remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions, lest his interest stray! The Author Online forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.