I'm looking for a C# / ASP.net website that I can download the source code and practice on, ideally it will come with documentation and hopefully some "bugs" or feature requests to try fixing.
Dose anyone know where to find such a website?
I would take a look at the ASPNET starter kits. They don't come with bugs for you to fix, but I'm sure you can find some lacking functionality you would like to implement.
Take a look at the open source projects on CodePlex, there are plenty of projects you can learn from and contribute to there.
You could also go hunting for .NET projects on SourceForge.
If you'd like to look at MVC, try the NerdDinner. Look at the bottom of the page, you can download the source code and a sample chapter that gives a very good walkthrough of the application.
Related
I'm just looking for some advice really on CMS choice. The website will need some kind of CMS for sure, because the requirement is that the end user is able to add multiple "project case studies" under a bunch of different categories, and also spawn separate pages, and change general bits of content around the site. It's quite simple really, but the site needs to be easily navigated where these case studies are loaded via AJAX requests.
I'm looking closely at Orchard, a .NET CMS based on MVC2, but it seems kinda like overkill for the project - it has a bunch of features I'd never be using on the website and I don't want to overdo it. Plus, it's still a little bit buggy because debug messages keep coming up looking for debug classes that don't exit.
Any advice would be awesome!
Thanks!
No matter what CMS you choose, it's likely to have stuff you don't need, as a CMS is necessarily casting its net very wide. It is supposed, after all, to be able to manage any kind of content.
I'd like to understand what you mean by "debug messages keep coming up looking for debug classes that don't exist". Can you elaborate, maybe on a PM so I can understand if that is a real bug that we should fix.
When it comes to opensource .net cms, I had very good experience with N2 CMS. You can check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/n2cms/n2cms
There was a discussion recently, regarding whether to use Umbraco or Orchard as a backend for ASP.NET webstie/application. You could try reading this, I guess you'd find a solution there.
I have been thinking of starting a site of my own for long time. I am good at all concepts of C#/ASP.NET and all DB stuff. I have created and can create a site from scratch for myself. But the effort/time involved in creating a site from scratch is little discouraging, where next thing (and more important thing) I need to worry about is the content on the site.
I have seen many sites and blogs (few links below).
I need to know, what is the general approach while creating a similar site?
Are there any general tips i need to be aware of before starting one?
http://naspinski.net
http://codeclimber.net.nz
Do you mean stating you own Blog?
you can open blog on some free service as Blogger and see how it goes.
Later you can buy you own domain name and hosting, install existing Blog engine there(even open source if you want to tweak it) and continue from there.
after comment clarification:
Buy a domain name, buy disk space and traffic from hosting company. Install ant cms(content managment system)/blog/forum/anything else you wan ton the host. Develop only the parts you can't find in existing cms/blog systems. No need to develop everything from scratch. With saved time you can take any open-source blog/cms engine and help them with patches.
Consider some open source C#/asp.net blogging platforms:
Oxite
BlogEngine.NET
Subtext
If you're talking about a blog site, there's no need to reinvent the wheel unless you just want to. There are plenty of capable blog engines in any language of your choice. Go with one and extend it if necessary.
Building your own blog engine is fast and easy. Building a good one is slow and hard. I've written many iterations of my blog - currently version 6 using ASP.NET and C#, and working on the design for version 7.
As to whether it's worth it, that's really your call. Do you code in your free time? Enjoy it? Are you willing to go through the whole lifecycle?
You will be responsible for:
Analysis & Design
Development
Testing
Deployment
Prod support
It's worth it to me. Is it worth it to you?
It really depends how much time you're willing to spend on it and what kind of site.If you want a blog site,there are a lot of free blog engine out there that you can use and takes a little time to make it live.My number one recommendation is blogengine.net...very flexible,a lot of choices for theme,and easy to set up.However, if you're like me that is willing to spend a lot of time building it then go for it.I started building my site....a social networking site(http://www.joecaps.com) December 2008 and until now I'm still building it.
I've always worked with the standard Linux web stack (linux, apache, php, python, mysql) but have been given a great job opportunity working with a group that works with the Microsoft Web Stack (IIS, ASP.NET, MSSQL, C#).
There seems to be a pretty good Microsoft following here on SO. Where should I begin? Specific books, tutorials, online resources are appreciated.
ASP.NET MVC will probably seem more familiar to you than ASP.NET WebForms. And honestly, I think that most pro-shops are going to move towards it over the next 5 years.
There are some really good tutorials (the kind that WebForms still doesn't have) at this site.
http://www.asp.net/Learn/mvc/
MSSQL (other than some tweaks to syntax) and IIS will probably be less of a hurdle, unless you'll specifically be administering them. I'd focus on learning C# and ASP.NET.
A good resource for C# is the MSDN C# tutorials.
A good resource for ASP.NET is the ASP.NET Quickstart Site.
RampUp is Microsoft's intro learning site. There are learning paths based on the background of the developer (like you for a LAMP stack)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/default.aspx
Additionally, the Asp.Net site has a bunch of tutorials and videos
http://www.asp.net/learn/
The data access tutorials available here from the ASP.NET website are as good a place as any for the experienced IT professional to learn about SQL Server data access in ASP.NET.
Would recommend www.learnvisualstudio.net great for staters.
If books are your best learning source then some I found helpful:
Pro C#
Pro ASP.NET
CLR via C#
The third book is about the common language runtime (what executes compiled C# code).
ASP.Net has a few different approaches. There's inline coding (much like PHP and ASP Classic), code behind and MVC.
To start out I would just stick with inline coding. Working with ASP.Net controls and view states is pretty hairy at first so I'd get familiar with the syntax to start and then move on.
Lot of good web sites in this SO thread. I very much lke MSDN Virtual Labs. They have them on just about every technology in the stack and they let you get your hands on the technology and play around.
You should definitely read a good quality book, about C#, I would recommend a C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, Third Edition book, from O'Reilly.
Then you should look into some MS stack specific pages, as is the CodeProject (www.codeproject.com/) site.
At the end you should start read some interesting blogs, on technologies you will work with.
You definitely should not miss the following ones:
weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/
www.hanselman.com/blog/
haacked.com
That would be for a start. :)
(sorry for missing links, but SO say I am a new user, and I can post only one link. :( )
I would suggest you read C# in Depth by Jon Skeet, who is a user here at SO. It will definitely help you master C#. The rest is gravy.
On Stack Overflow, I've seen a few people referring to the MVC Futures library
What is this project? How do I use it? Where is the documentation?
Check Eilon Lipton's Blog :
In this blog post I'll introduce you
to a feature that's not even part of
the main ASP.NET MVC download. It's
part of the separate MVC Futures
download, which includes prototypes of
features that we're thinking of
including in a future version of
ASP.NET MVC.
There is no documentation because it is very early prototype work. We do post the source code so if you're really interested, you can figure it out. Over time, we'll start to blog about it and provide samples. Right now, our focus is on the main product. We post the futures to provide a way for those who really want to dig into the source to provide feedback on what we're thinking about for the future.
Take a look at this blog. It highlights areas of the MVC Future
http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu/archive/tags/MVC/default.aspx
At my place of work I've been put in charge of creating a coding standards document. Generally we follow what FxCop and StyleCop tools report to some degree but what we really require is document that will explain when to use a convention, why and maybe even a simple example.
This could be extended in the future for other purposes as well.
The first thing that came to my mind is to have an internal wiki site that we could build up and change easily over time but I've never used a wiki-based engine before and would like some recommendations.
If possible the engine should be in C# so we're able to tweak it to our needs if required.
If you think a wiki solution is the wrong way to go about this then please give an alternative :)
Update
I've just been informed, although we do have a php server it wont be staying, so I'm afraid php-based wiki ideas are off the table.
Update 2
Could you also (if possible) let me know if any of these solutions work with Active Directory?
Cheers
Tony
ScrewTurn Wiki is an free and open-source wiki made in C# and ASP.Net. Different database back-ends can be used, like MSSQL and MySQL, but also works without any database. It has several plugins to work with Active Directory.
Mindtouch Deki
Great wiki and it's built on C# and PHP, so you can use it on Mono or .NET
It also has Active Directory integration.
Download their ready-to-use VMware image. It started using it on my own PC then moved it to the company's VMware server when they had it ready.
We keep an internal wiki at my shop that has almost all of our documentation (not just coding standards). We didn't really see the need to roll our own so we just used MediaWiki...
We use JAMWiki and love it.
It is a solid application, we have had nothing but good interaction with both the application and the developers.
The guy you maintains the code does a great job answering questions and helping users out.
Brad Abrams has published an online set of C# coding standrds:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/articles/361363.aspx
If you go to the starter kits section of the Microsoft ASP.NET site, you will find several wikis to download such as ScrewTurn and Flexwiki. A wiki would be ideal for your needs by the sound of it :-)
I second MediaWiki. It's not C#, but it can be a nice excuse to sneak some free software in through the backdoor.
If you guys are a Microsoft shop, though, and are using Sharepoint, it has some built-in wiki-esque functionality.
In one project that I develop, I set up one MediaWiki wiki for development documentation, and one for online help.
I even generate part of the development documentation right from source code and database.
At the shop I'm at they use a commercial package which is really good: Confluence. What's especially nice is that it integrates with LDAP/AD so that you don't need a seperate login and it's build especially with business use in mind and has lots of free plugins. We couldn't live without it.
I am confused by what you mean when you say you don't have a php server. It runs on every platform known to man. I am noticing most Visual Studio Developers don't know that PHP runs on IIS.
I would go with mediawiki It has the biggest feature set and most add-ons developed for it in case you ever need to port your data elsewhere. If you need to modify your wiki you are doing it wrong.