ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

1.3. Solution

The Solution section of each chapter will contain the instructions and actual code for implementing all the features and requirements outlined and designed in the previous sections. For this first chapter, however, I'll give you a more detailed description of exactly what the following chapters will cover, so that you can get a good idea of what the final result will be like.

In Chapter 2 you'll build the site's design, the graphics, and the layout that's shared among all pages of the site, through the use of master pages, new in ASP.NET 2.0. You will also use themes—another new feature introduced by ASP.NET 2.0—to create a couple of different visual appearances for the same master page, and create a mechanism to enable users to select their own favorite theme from a drop-down list, so that they can change the colors and overall appearance of the site according to their taste and possible visual impediments. Finally, a flexible and easy to maintain navigation system will be built by means of the new Web.sitemap file and the Menu and SiteMapPath controls.

In Chapter 3 you'll lay down the foundations for building a flexible, easily configurable, and instrumented site. First of all, there will be a pluggable data access layer (DAL) that can support any type of data store, and scalable to offer the best performance even under high usage. Then a business logic layer will be built on the top of the DAL to expose the data in an object-oriented way, with the required validation ...