Chapter 18 shopping cart...not really

Chapter 18 claims that it shows you how to add a shopping cart to a web site similar to the one created in chapter 17. This is not true. This chapter is heavy on programming in VB, defines classes and shows you controls to use the methods of the classes you make and view the data, kind of. It does all of this without teaching you programming. As a programmer I can see whats going on: you have files where you create classes and the methods, although not as elegantly as with netbeans ( no auto-creation of getters and setters and all that other cool stuff netbeans makes easy); It shows how to use a data object similar to the ones used with a database that can attach to or call the functionality of a class, create an instance of that class and call the classes' methods.

It's just like the section on creating and using web services but adds the functionality of one control, the data view control that calls methods. It's totally a dumbed down version of what I already learned. The shopping cart system is not encapsulated in any easy to use or set up controls as one would expect nor does this chapter get into any of the details of how to actually apply or accept payment, do payment confirmation, or update your inventory! Its rediculously stupid. Probably because I'm missing some point, but I dunno, maybe it really is just stupid.

If I were to do this I would use the services framework. I would create a whole self encapsulated set of shopping cart classes with all kinds of cool methods. Make display methods that are easy to export to a website, similar to what they showed me here but better and as part of the shoppingcart class. I would have a set of classes with methods for inventory, inventory controls and updates. I would have the checkout class and methods that upon payment receipt and confirmation would run the inventory update methods, among other things such as updating sales records databases. In this way I would be taking full advantage of object oriented programming so that I can make any page I want for any user, customers, managers, sales clerks, whatever to use to look up prices, update prices, query sales volume and profit and whatever.

The single puprose programming of this chapter that hard codes functionality into controls that are difficult to update, move around, and control goes against every good programming practice I have ever been taught.

I am very disappointed. I demand asp.net shopping cart controls with standard views, access to gridview controls, auto database update functionality so you can parse any list of items for the store in xml or any database file or a spreadsheet and have it auto format the things so its easy to use. But no, they don't have that. I got my hopes up for nothing.

gah

Chapter 17 * user authentication*

This chapter goes into the controls in asp.net that do user authentication and access controls to your site using the different levels of authentication. This chapter brought everything together and added new functionality in a very interesting way. You use a template website provided by microsoft. You then add a database to this website, a database auto-created by the asp.net controls you use to create a new user, and allow people to log into your site. I then created different login pages, the login page, the new user login page, the forgot password page. I also added a functional button to the master page that tracks login status and allows you to log out.

I then went through and played with the login access tools. I learned how to set up different folders to hold different pages that are of a more limited acces. So pages only administrators can see are in the admin folder, and less restricted pages in a less restricted folder, and then regular pages in another folder and so on. Then I set access controls to each folder, to make things easier to organize, and asp.net keeps track of everything for me. It also briefly shows how to set access to individual pages through the web.config file, just like we did with java, in case I want to know how that works.

This is pretty powerful stuff that asp.net makes very easy to implement and use.

Chapter 16

This is the only chapter I didn't like. It seems like it was added in as an after thought. It explained the use of controls that are to be implemented in the future. These controls allow you to host silverlight and flash content on your website. It is pretty self explanatory. The only really interesting part was the part about imbedding windows media files on your site and the part about linking to pdf or word/excel files. The interesting part is that with regular files you can use a hyperlink type control and tell it to run the file in word. The url is basically just the path name to the file. It also tells you how to force the client to be asked to download the file or not, effectively blocking people form linking your document from other websites.

Chapter 15 *awesome reference*

This chapter is amazing. It shows how to use some pretty elaborate ajax tools to make a web page look awesome. It shows how to add watermarks to text boxes. How to use a calendar to input dates. How to set up input boxes to have auto-formats and how to make them accept specific characters. It shows how you can include auto-complete functionality to your work, and other things like that. It also shows how to have an always on top box, like for those really annoying advertisements, but I'd rather not know how to do that, I can get myself into trouble playing with it.

Overall nothing terribly new here as far as strategy its just all about applying the skills I have learned so far in ever more interesting ways.

Chapter 14

This chapter shows how talented the author of the book is. He takes a simple task, making thumbnails of pictures available on a website, and uses that as a seemingly easy premise for you to learn some unusually difficult tasks. In this way you don't get intimidated by the difficult things, he gives you perspective and a goal, and because of this things are really easy to learn.

This section shows how to upload data to a website and work with that data. Specifically image files, but they could be anything because you use an upload controller then add other controls that check for the file type. The other really cool thing that I noticed is that asp.net sets up and uses variables with its controls that can be passed around very easily. I don't have to do all the work like I did with java to specify variables to be used. This functionality is by control, so any control that may pass a variable has a default variable set up just in case you want to use it.

Other than the simple tasks of uploading data this section got into formatting images, again, which isn't too difficult. It also showed a function of asp.net that does auto-thumbnailing, i guess you would call it. It can take any .jpeg or .gif file and automatically format it to a thumbnail. Because of the variable functionality of controls, you can pass the information around easily and run the toThumbnail function on it and put the thumbnail on the page where u want.

Pretty cool.

Chapter 13

This chapter wasn't terribly exciting. It just went into more detail on the item templates in the view controls. This means that it tells you how to work with html forms that are auto-generated by the view controls. It goes into the logic behind how the controls work so that you can make use of the control's functionality much better. It didn't show how to do anything new, it just explained how and why things work the way that they do.

Chapter 12 * reference chapter * important for review when creating any page

Chapter 12 is a reference chapter. It discusses usability, accessibility, load speed and caching. It talks about, and references, many ways to set up a web page to adhere to different usability standards, such as for blind or other disabled users. It also has a section on how to set up page caching to increase server speed. There is also a section(s) on usability functions such as tabbing, default cursor locations and what not.

There was very little hands on practice involved in this section. It was put in, I believe, to give the user, me, a better understanding of how the previous, and probably the future, sections of the book should be fit together. It gives quick references to previous sections of note to help make the point. This chapter is the most important chapter I have encountered so far in that it raises many questions that you as a page designer need to keep in mind. These questions that the chapter raises should be asked during the initial design phase before you start coding anything. It should also be referenced once the site has been finished and you are doing the QA and error testing/functionality testing work.