Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5

Chapter 3. Building the Web Layer Using ASP.NET AJAX

The biggest challenge you’ll face developing an Ajax web portal is providing almost all of your web application’s functionality on a single page. A web portal is all about aggregating many services in one place. It’s a never-ending challenge to have as many features on one page as possible yet keep them small, simple, and fast. So, the Default.aspx is the most complicated of all the pages in your application because it does everything from loading Ajax frameworks to serving the widgets on the page. Sometimes it is the only page users will see during their entire stay on the web site.

In this chapter, you will learn to code the Start page Default.aspx, the widget container, and the IWidget and IWidgetHost interfaces. Then you will put it all together and build a Flickr photo widget and a RSS widget. Finally, you will use ASP.NET 2.0 Membership and Profile providers to implement authentication, authorization, and profiles.

Implementing the Start Page of a Web Portal

The Default.aspx page in this web project is the Start page of the Ajax web portal. (see Figure 3-1).

It contains the following:

• The header which shows a search box

• The Add Stuff area where users can add more widgets

• The tab bar

• The columns

• The footer

The Default.aspx page starts with regular ASP.NET page syntax (see Example 3-1).

Figure 3-1. The Default.aspx page contains almost ...