I am starting to work on implementing ASP.NET (using VS.NET Dev 2003) into
our current ASP 3.0 intranet setup. We have several (say 15 - 20)
"applications" that are run within our intranet, which leads me to the
following questions:
1. I currently use an ISAPI filter to "force" all pages to run through a
page called site_template.asp. This file "templates" the pages with common
code and a page "skin". This forces all pages (whether it be .asp, .htm,
..html, etc) to go though the "site template", and have had very good success
with this. In ASP.NET, how can this be achieved? I have read several
articles about "page templating", but they all seem to be only using .aspx
files, which leads me to believe that you can not "force" templating for
..htm files. Our users upload .htm & .html files for publishing on our
Intranet, but they also need to be templated. Should I modify the ISAPI
filter to change the files to process through an .aspx or .ascs file? If
so, how would I setup the .aspx/.ascx file? Also, I don't want the address
location to change on the user's browser. In the current setup, even though
the page(s) are all running through site_template.asp, the location in the
user's browser never changes. I would like to keep that functionality in
..NET.
2. Using VS.NET Dev 2003, how can I set up "sub-solutions"? In other
words, how can I setup our basic "Intranet" solution, but also make it so
that I can have, for instance, an Address Book be it's own solution? I know
that I can just set it up with it's own virtual directory, and setup the
web.config file, etc, but I don't want the authentication (since at that
point, they are already authenticated) to re-initiate. I want to be able to
edit the Address Book solution without having to load the main "Intranet"
solution, which in that case I would have to publish the entire "Intranet"
solution, when I just want to be able to publish the "Address Book" solution
to our production server.
3. Source Control: Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I'm currently
working with SourceGear Vault, which seems to be very good (we don't have
Visual SourceSafe).
4. In working with my current Intranet solution (using ASP 3.0), how can I
"integrate" ASP.NET at the root level without VS.NET loading the entire
Intranet? I would like to start working on a new Intranet .NET theme setup,
but don't want to mess with the setup of the ASP files (or setup). Should I
just create a new project @ http://localhost? Or, should I create one using
a virtual directory? If I do that, then when all is setup, I'll have to
transfer all the static pages into the new .NET setup and I'm also concerned
with space limitations. My laptop sandbox is already almost full and I
don't have room to copy all the files into a new .NET setup area, so I would
like to "integrate" the two.
5. Last thing. What files in a solution are needed for it to run on our
production server? In our solution view, we have (for example)
default.aspx, default.aspx.vb, default.aspx.res. When I want to publish a
solution for our production server, what needs to be copied over? Does the
entire solution including all files need to be published, or just the
default.aspx and solution .dll?
Thanks to everyone that can help!
Chad
