Bryan Sampica

http://www.devconnections.com/

What a great time to be had a development conferences.  Putting that many smart people in one room should be illegal honestly.  Two solid days of .NET energy (and one adobe flex talk, ...<blink>) - Culminated with a 4 hour presentation by Scott Guthrie on the new Visual Studios 2008 / .NET 3.0 and 3.5 features. 

In all the examples we've seen so far, we've returned simple strings, integers, or a standard type / value.  That's all fine and good, until we have something a little more complex to return, or need to return a list or array of something, or a list of type.  In the following example I'll demonstrate through code how to accomplish just that.

Ok, so I finally bit the bullet and scheduled some time to sit down and take a look at Microsoft's up and coming server platform currently code-named Longhorn.  I almost exclusively use Virtual PC 2007 for this type of testing, and this was no exception.  The OS gave me no issues installing in this environment and greeted me after a few reboots with a healthy logon screen that is similar but somewhat less decorated than the Windows Vista logon screen.

In the first installment of this series, we discussed the reasons for creating a clean and efficient UI, and some of the methods behind it.  If you haven't read the first part I suggest you do so here.  In this article we are going to go over some of the basics in getting setup to provide a streamlined user interface in a business sector.  Examples of use would be an intranet application, a Contact management solution, or some similar file / information store.  We'll discuss the pro's and con's of a few model types and ultimately choose a method and start our design.  The goal at the end of this article is to provide an interface "shell" that can be reused across different application types.  This shell should be similar to a template, but more extensible. 

David Yancey over at his Geebs blog has created a slick little bit of code to allow users to put a "Who's online" type of control on their sites by querying the membership provider.  It appears it also allows for anonymous users as well.  Check it out

I've tried to be as thorough as possible in this series of articles,  this articles assume above beginner knowledge of CSS, ASP.NET controls, and AJAX Control Toolkit items.  The series is scheduled for 5 parts and at the end of the series I will provide a link to an example project that incorporates and demonstrates the items we'll talk about throughout the series.