I am beginning work on a somewhat complex project and I need to decide what
route to take before beginning the project. The main issue with this
project is that it needs to be modular and support customized additions on
standard pages. What I mean by the last statement is this.
I have a webpage UserSignup.aspx that has all of the standard profile fields
(name, address, email, phone). This page resides in a standard project so
that any changes made to this page and all others within this project will
be reflected in all client applications. I also want to have custom
projects that will be used to add any customized features to standard pages
as well as completely new pages. An example would be that this custom
project needs to display and capture the birthdate of the user.
Back in the old ASP days, I just used include files everywhere that would be
empty unless someone wanted to throw in some custom features. All that was
required of me to add a new feature was to add the custom code in the custom
include files and poof; the custom feature would show up. I am planning on
doing all my development with .NET 2.0.
I have added other custom web projects into another project, but they never
required me to add custom functions and processes to existing, standardized
pages. I basically had an empty shell of the custom project added to the
solution of the standard project.
I have a few ideas, but they all seem to be somewhat problematic and I am
not eve sure if they will work.
a.. Create user controls within the custom projects. Use these controls
to handle all of the custom feature processing.
b.. Do it all in code. Call empty functions in a blank (shell) custom
project and when extra features need to be added, do it all in code behind
to create and add controls to the standard page. Any processing that is
required will also be performed through these functions.
c.. Use the App_Code directory to store all of the custom functions. This
will function similar to the solution above.
Another monkey wrench for this project is that it needs to support multiple
languages. I plan on taking advantage of the new 2.0 features to handle the
culture settings, but what about the custom features?
I realize that this is sort of vague, but I did not want to over do it. Any
ideas, thoughts, criticisms would greatly be appreciated.
Thanks,
Shawn
shawncutter AT gmail.com
