Hello Joe,
Welcome to the ASPNET newsgroup.
From your description, you're going to develop an ASP.NET (2.0?) web
application framework which will provide the sufficient flexiblity and
reusablity so that other vendors or users will be able to customize it
easily, correct?
Based on my experience, here are some of my understanding and suggestions:
1. ASP.NET 2.0 has naturally support visual inheritance through the
MasterPage feature. Master page is somewhat like a page template where we
can define some common UI elements(such as logo, banner, side navigation
bar, etc...). Then, other concrete pages in our web application can apply
this master page so that those common UI elements will be inherited from
the master page(note that the implementation of masterpage is not class
level inheritance in OO, but the "aggregation" model). In another word,
visual inheritance is not actual OO inheritance. Such visual inheritance
can make our web site's pages be consistent in UI, and easy to modify it
(we only need to modify the master page when necessary). However, for your
scenario, it won't be quite easy to be further reused after precompilation.
2. To make the #1 abit more flexible, you can consider constructing the
master page UI through code dynamically, e.g. the logo, banner or
navigatino bars in the master page can be loaded at runtime(from other
separate ascx usercontrols).
3. If we want the most flexibility and reusability, we can also consider
defining a base page class completely from scratch, the base page class
will purely use code to programmatically construct the UI (from some
external template files or usercontrols). However, in this approach, we'll
lose the convenience provided by the built-in features in ASP.NET 2.0 (such
as master page). Also, generally speaking, the more we provide on
flexibility, the more we'll lose in performance.
Here are some web articles I've searched over internet some of which have
mentioned some of the approach I mentioned:
#Building Re-Usable ASP.NET User Control and Page Libraries with VS 2005
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archi...28/423888.aspx
#Master Your Site Design with Visual Inheritance and Page Templates
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/is...20MasterPages/
#Creating Usable Page Templates in ASP.NET
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/18011
#Creating Reusable Content in ASP.NET
http://www.informit.com/articles/art...?p=173411&rl=1
In addition, I suggest you also have a look at some well-know 3rd party web
application framework such as the dotnetnuke. Maybe you can get some good
ideas from them.
Hope this helps some.
Regards,
Steven Cheng
Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead
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