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.

Chapter 11 * project* visual xml editor

Chapter 11 was very short, especially compared to the Linq chapters. It went into detail on how to use tree controls to create tree items for navigating your website. It also went into menu controls. Also it showed how to set up a master xml file for navigation, the web.sitemap xml file. This file is designed to store all site mapping data in xml format for use by your controls, if you wish. I don't understand why they can't use a different data form for this master file. There is no good xml editing tool with visual studio, if I use this file, which I will, im going to have to download a visual xml editor, as recommended by the book.

The coolest part was the breadcrumb control. Also, all of these controls are smart, the menu, tree and breadcrumb. You can style them, or set up a stylesheet for them, and do all the cool things we went over in chapter 10. The menu control is particularly smart in that it has primary nodes, with direct links to a main page, and sub menus that pop up when you mouse over the main link. These sub links inheret styles from the parent link, which is awesome, automatically and they can also be tweaked as you see fit.

These chapters are also good at putting things together because in practice you keep reusing tools you learned in previous chapters and build on their functionality. This means that all my other skills are being reinforced and this reinforcement makes using these advanced functions, as well as understanding them, quick and easy.

Chapter 10

So chapter 10 was quick and dirty, just like Dr. Piercy's javascript tutorials. It went into a brief overview of the html style uses. Then went into depth on how to use style sheets, which are awesome, master pages, and skins. Pretty incredible stuff for making a large site look coherent and is good for managing everything.

I don't like the skins idea, I don't see the point in using them anymore given how easy it is to use style sheets and the style sheets control. You can have as many style sheets as you want, or style classes defined in style sheets, organized in your style sheets folder, and apply whatever classes you want. You can also apply these elements to the master page and inheret the master page you want, having many master pages for different page designes, with each of your pages to have a very consistent easy to manage website.

Chapter 9 * project ideas * and further research needed

Chapter 9 was interesting. It went into detail on how to pull in data from rss feeds to represent xml data. Then it showed a quick overview of xml and described, briefly, how xml works. Then i saw how to create some xml, its looks alot like html, and how to modify the xml data and turn it into html.

It then went into showing you how to incorporate webservices into your system. You can program your own web services and host them. Or you can call other web services so long as you have access to them. I think this is very cool especially having just finished the BPMN class that was all about service oriented architecture. Microsoft has its WCF, windows communication foundation, which itself is a service, which is a service that handles connecting to services. Its pretty cool, kinda like linq.

I now have some questions. I want to be able to do asp.net with java, I think i can hax my program to make it possible, i don't see why I shouldn't be able to. It uses html, so I should be able to javascript and have java files that my stuff can use for calling objects. If it can't do it inherently, I should be able to hax it just like I did with the ajax controls. That means bring in third party controls to make it doable. This way I can program in Netbeans, import those java files and use them in my .net applications. I will have to research this a bit.

I also don't see how I can take an excel spreadsheet, parse the information via linq, and then save that data as a new entry into a database. I may have to custom code that, but it seems that it should be a function of LINQ. If not I can just parse the data by fields, create an empty database with the tables set up to handle the data then create a few functions to fill in each column at a time based on the data in the array that LINQ creates.... Maybe. I think that will be part of my project.

Linq

Language Integrated Query

My original post referencing linq was apparently quite accurate. Here is the source information about linq, everything you want to know written by the people that made it.

Summary: LINQ to SQL provides a runtime infrastructure for managing relational data as objects without losing the ability to query. Your application is free to manipulate the objects while LINQ to SQL stays in the background tracking your changes automatically.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi-in/library/bb425822(en-us).aspx

Thanks,

Alex

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 was a pain in my ass. The book didn't explain that I had to import System.Linq into my aspx.vb file as well as reference System.Linq in my project. Without the System.Linq my aspx.vb files can't query the data.

After long hours of web searching and trying to figure out what was going on, I fixed the problem.

This chapter works with lots of VB scripting. I believe I have finally obtained a strong understanding of VB syntax. I can read written code very well, now, but I am not sure that I can code it without referencing existing code. This, however, isn't a problem. I learn to code by referencing examples then playing with the syntax.

This chapter was almost exactly like the last chapter, but more focused on the SQL side of Linq. This was most apparent with the VB code where you create a variable to act as a Database holder, i suppose is how it works, based on the data that I put into my project from the database I connected to it, and then call methods associated with the database object that act as insert and delete, update and what not variables. You then take those variables and do a SubmitChanges() that takes all the floating variable associated with whatever database object you are working with, such as db.SubmitChanges() and actually updates the database.

Its kinda a mind screw having to think about initializing a database as an object just to pull the data out and work with it. Then having the SQL commands be handles as variables which i guess are more like objects that inherit from the database object and have values that you provide when you create them. Its very similar to having to learn to transpose music when you sight read, you go little weird in the head until you understand it.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7 went into detail about how Linq works. It teaches logic and syntax and goes over the different methods available within the Linq object. It functions very much like SQL, well, exactly like SQL, but with the added benefit of the other methods and Linq's functionality to search any data set, pretty much.

It is kinda quirky to work with, but given my background with SQL and Java it made lots of sense and I believe I have a pretty good understanding of how it works. We will see when they go into more detail in chapter 8.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 went into detail on how to connect to a database. It also went into how to create and use, very briefly, session variables. It went into great detail on SQLdata controls and how to set those up to handle different input types as well as how to format view controls to make your information look interesting.

This chapter presented some very simple concepts then applied them in very interesting ways. I am going to reference this chapter as I progress for information on how to manipulate data I obtain from a database.

Chapter 5, End of Section 1

I just finished up going through chapter 5. It beat to death how to handle user input in different ways. It was very boring, but I did realize I needed to switch over to Visual Basic because the dummies book is written for using visual basic and goes into detail the logic behind where and how you use visual basic.

I am looking forward to the next section that goes into much more detail with how to use a database with your web applications.

Chapter 4 progress: 1

I almost completed chapter 4. I ran into an issue. My book gives instructions in visual basic. I have it set up to run with visual c#. I am having problems validating the date data because my program won't run the VB commands and I don't know the c# commands to make it work. I will have to do some research into c# and get a c# book before I can finish this chapter.

Thanks,

Alex

Progress Update

I got the c# book and found c# to be less useful to me. The dummies book I am using goes into great detail on how visual basic works and how I can use it. I have found that visual basic has many build in functions that make it much more efficient to use, for now, for this class.

Moving forward I would learn c# separately and write and keep a compilation of many good classes and their methods I write so that I can just search them and pop em into my .net work.
Such as data validation methods in a data validation class. But that is a whole other idea altogether.

Chapter 3

So, chapter 3 was short and sweet. It was pretty awesome though. I learned how to create a microsoft SQL database, use tools to create a table for the database, then add the table to the website I created for my chapter 3 project. ( the project is just my hands on work working through the book) Not bad for 30 minutes.

The next chapter I will learn how to do data management. Thats pretty cool, I'm learning in 2 hours how to do stuff with asp.net that took me 1 and 2/3 a semester with java using netbeans. I haven't really learned how to use c#, its all the IDE doing the work, but still, its not bad.

Shows how good my training was with my programming classes.


Thanks,

Alex

Chapters 1 & 2

I just completed chapters 1 and 2. They walked me through installing and setting up my microsoft visual studio and adding components to the tool box. It also had me create a very very basic website that consists of a button that I renamed and changed the background color.

I expect chapter 3 to be much more entertaining. I will post on that when I finish it, probably within the hour.

Thanks

Alex

Crouse Schedule Proposal

The book I am using is set up into 5 sections. Each section has ~ 5 chapters. There are about 13 weeks left in the semester. I figure I will take 2 weeks per section. 3 Weeks extra time at the end, 2 weeks to accommodate any deviations from this schedule and give an extra 1 week for work solely on the final project for this class.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this schedule would be great. Also, the final section is just a set of trouble shooting tutorials that I may not have to work through for this course.

Thanks,

Alex

Book Selection

Michael Tripp and myself have pretty much decided to go with the Dummies books for asp.net. I found a quote from a book review on the dummies book:

I must say that the author has taken a huge effort to present the complex topics in a simple way. I must point out that the book helps a beginner to learn ASP.NET 3.5 quickly and in a user-friendly manner. I very much liked the style of presentation and highly recommend the book for all level of developers.

It has an overall user rating that is very high on all the sights I checked out. I also spoke to a friend of mine, who is a masters of artificial intelligence major and who got his undergrad in comp sci, about his opinion on a good book to learn asp.net and he said dummies was the best, hands down.

Introduction

This blog is for my, Alex Bynum, asp.net directed study course. Dr. Piercy is my instructor. I will be posting updates about my studies centered around short how to tutorials for my own reference as well as for other people's reference. I will also document my thoughts and ideas about my studies.


Thanks,

Alex