Where to start?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sam Carleton
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Sam Carleton

Folks, I am not new to programming. I have been a C/C++ Windows
programmer for eight years now. Over the years I have dabbled with web
programming, but real web programming has always eluded me. It still
eludes me, even with .Net.

Call me crazy, but for some reason I get the impression that the first
step in developing a web site is developing a navigation system. Of all
the examples and walkthroughs I have been able to find in MSDN, the only
one dealing with navigation is the "Walkthrough: Creating a Web User
Control". The problem with this walkthough is that I don't want
everything on one page! This is the top most navigation where I want
the user to go different pages.

Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on how to get a solid navigation
into place with .Net? Or do I simply have to except that navigation
between different pages is painful anywhere?

Sam Carleton
http://www.miltonstreet.com/scarleton/ <-- current home page on UNIX
 
Navigation between pages (and storing state between pages) is one of the
biggest design decisions for most web apps.
There are a lot of ways to go about it, and .NET 1.x doesn't provide
anything especially helpful in this regard other than giving you plenty of
options to choose from. .NET 2.0 will have a lot of new navigation
functionality built in that should simplify things.

Until then you might look at some of these links:
http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2003/04/07/aspnetnav.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/04/ASPNETUserState/default.aspx
http://www.aspnetpro.com/productreviews/2003/02/asp200302gm_p/asp200302gm_p.asp
 
Navigation between pages (and storing state between pages) is one of the
biggest design decisions for most web apps.
There are a lot of ways to go about it, and .NET 1.x doesn't provide
anything especially helpful in this regard other than giving you plenty of
options to choose from. .NET 2.0 will have a lot of new navigation
functionality built in that should simplify things.

Until then you might look at some of these links:
http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2003/04/07/aspnetnav.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/04/ASPNETUserState/default.aspx
http://www.aspnetpro.com/productreviews/2003/02/asp200302gm_p/asp200302gm_p.asp
Click to expand...

Steve,

Ok, so I did my moaning and groaning now I guess I should actually let you
know what I am looking for:) I am not so concerned with maintaining state
(yet), but the ease of adding and subtracting links. Take a look at my
personal homepage:

<http://www.miltonstreet.com/scarleton>

There is a home page, but click on any link and I have a navbar/menu system.
The whole navbar is described with XML. Server side XSLT is used to transform
the XML into the HTML that is used by the JavaScript to make the navbar work,
and there is something to indicate where you are on the site. The beauty of
this is that I simply add an entry to the XML, run a script that then will
create the skeleton page, and the new link is on every page!

What I am after is some system where to add a new page is simply editing a
table somewhere (struct, class, xml, db table, matters not), create the new
page, stick the code for the system on the page and bam, every page with the
code for the system knows about the new page.

I don't mind writing code, I have been doing it for years:) I just need to
know where/how to start!

Sam
 
..NET 2.0 has functionality that makes it simple to implement exactly what
you describe.
http://www.asp.net/whidbey/misc/chap5.pdf

However .NET 1.x is not quite as robust as you describe. You'll have to
write a significant amout of custom code to get it to achieve your wishes.
A user control or custom control would likely be up to the task.
You might also consider creating a base page for all your pages to inherit
from. This page could hold the common logic for managing your XML tree of
pages.
 
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