In this video tutorial, Scott Drake walks you through the end-to-end process of creating a simple data-driven web application with UnifiedASP. It is the easiest way to get a quick overview of the UnifiedASP framework and our build process.
Part 1: Downloading the framework and code generator and setting up your project and database
Part 2: Using the code generator to create the foundation for the application
Part 3: integrating the generated code with your project and database
Read Time: 5 minutes
Synopsis: Required configuration is kept at a minimum in UnifiedASP because drag-and-drop installation was a critical goal of the team. UnifiedASP does provide a mechanism to establish a default page, setup e-mail server support for notifications, and multiple connection strings.
Read Time: 10 minutes
Synopsis: Session management is expected to do many things in modern web application development. UnifiedASP’s session tools can keep track of if a user is logged in, who the user is, what pages are being accessed, and provides wrapper functions that will more-easily allow an application to be transitioned from native in-memory session storage to a database or other mechanism needed by a team in the future.
Url: http://www.unifiedasp.net/index.php/unifiedasp-session-primer/
Read Time: 15 Minutes
Synopsis: Many of the web server controls that ship with ASP.Net are very useful. However most require a good chunk of code with each use. We extended a few of these controls so we don’t have to do as much coding with each instance.
The biggest time-savers are in using the GridView and TextBox controls. In our GridView, all of the event-handlers for sorting and paging are built into the GridView itself so no additional work is required in each page. We also default the CSS definition so we don’t have to do that with each instance.
In TextBoxX, we package validators into the same control as the TextBox, so specifying something as required is as simple as setting a property of the TextBox itself.
Url: http://www.unifiedasp.net/index.php/unifiedasp-control-primer/
Read Time: 15 minutes
Synopsis: In UnifiedASP, pages are generally kept to a single task like showing a search, detail, or edit panel. Pages will also contain the majority of business logic since logic is rarely reused. Only when business logic is needed elsewhere in the application is it abstracted into a business layer. This document also details the logical lifecycle and how it fits into the ASP.Net page event sequence.
Url: http://www.unifiedasp.net/index.php/unifiedasp-pages-primer/
Read Time: 15 minutes
Synopsis: There are a ton of different approaches to interacting with a database. UnifiedASP’s goal is to make database access consistent across all instances, to make life as easy as possible on the consumers of data (the pages and business layer), and to support the two ways data is consumed, bound to controls and iterated in logic, through a single pattern of data-access objects.
Url: http://www.unifiedasp.net/index.php/unifiedasp-data-access-primer/
Read Time: 30 minutes
Synopsis: This document is more along the lines of a traditional coding guideline. As long as the developer is working within the framework and isn’t doing anything crazy in the application layer, the database will begin to break down first as an application scales. Therefore, more attention is paid to the database to ensure it is designed and constructed propertly. This document sets our expectations for how database development will be carried out, and our team members will be held to these standards.
Url: http://www.unifiedasp.net/index.php/sql-coding-guidelines/
Read Time: 15 minutes
Synopsis: Coding guidelines are created with good intentions but rarely read by developers. This guideline focuses mostly on building applications in ways that are discoverable to other developers, as well as a brief section on naming conventions, and we’ll leave the typical coding guidelines content to future posts in the blog.
Url: http://www.unifiedasp.net/index.php/aspnet-20-coding-guidelines/
If you happen to stumble in here one way or another, this site is being constructed and will launch sometime in April or May ‘09.