First shot at throwing a question on these boards so hopefully I can get some help, here goes:
I am working to start up the .NET practice at my client. We have 5 small scale .NET applications in place currently with a few them of them live into production. They're mostly small reporting pieces with some data entry/business logic functionality. Each of these applications is currently using the identical master pages.
What I mean is that there is a copy of the same master page in each application. They are all basic website->WCF->BL->DB tiered applications. So I have 4 copies of the same master page that I have to change when I make a change to it.
The client DOES NOT want to consolidate all of these into a single solution. They like the separation of applications across sites. I just don't want to continue dealing with the hassle of multiple updates for common elements (which there will be many more of across these applications).
The code is all stored in team foundation server. We also do NOT want to compile the master page into a .dll and deploy it.
Can anyone please make some suggestions as to how I can maintain a single copy of these common files (master, .css, etc) across my multiple applications.
thanks in advance
You might want to look at Sharing Master Pages in Visual Studio.
If that is no help then you could try using Build Events in Visual Studio. I would pick one of the projects to be my "Main Project" and only edit the master page from that project. When you build the project it would run a command that would copy that master page(if it had changed) to your set locations.
The client DOES NOT want to
consolidate all of these into a single
solution. They like the separation of
applications across sites. I just dont
want to continue dealing with the
hassle of multiple updates for common
elements (which there will be many
more of across these applications).
The code is all stored in team
foundation server. We also do NOT want
to compile the master page into a dll
and deploy it.
You eliminated the only two real options there. What all is in the master page? Would it be possible to extract the HTML UI elements to a single template or series of template HTML files and import those dynamically into the master page? You could then relocate the common HTML to an arbitrary URL and have the master page for each application pull it in dynamically.
Edit: I lied. You could also use a VirtualPathProvider like Sharepoint does to store the master page in a database or some other directory, but beware that VirtualPathProviders do not work in MediumTrust environments.
See:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.hosting.virtualpathprovider.aspx
If you are using Web Applications (compiled into a dll) rather than Web Sites you can do the following:
Right click on the folder you want to store the master page in
Select "Add Existing Item..."
Browse to the master page on the file system, and select both the .master and the .master.cs files.
Then, rather than clicking on the "Add" button, click on the little down arrow to the right of Add, this will bring up a little menu with the options: "Add" and "Add As Link"
Select "Add As Link" this will reference the file in your project, while leaving it in the original location in your dev environment - this allows you to edit it in either application, while keeping it up to date in the other applications.
Obviously if you edit the code behind, you'll need to re-compile the other projects before you deploy the changes to those sites.
This isn't available in web site projects as they rely on the file structure to work out what is in the project.
EDIT: Missed the css part. Obviously you won't be able to serve those files, so this should only work for the master page.
Don't know your scenario, so
IF you can control the DNS / virtual directories to the applications you could use a format like this:
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application1
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application2
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application3
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application4
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Application5
and have your Master page at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master,
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master.cs,
c:\inetpub\wwwroot\master.Master.cs.designer
Then you could reference the single copy of the master page from /../master.Master. I gave this a quick shot with a precompiled master page to make sure I could reach back beyond my root. You might have to give it a shot to see.
We use our source control to create links to the shared files in all the places that we need it. So if you edit in one place, you just need to do a get latest and it will appear in the other places you have linked it.
I ended up going with the VPP route. I created a virtual path provider and built my master page into a DLL and this is working. Now I have a massive problem though in that a Content page whos master page is late bound through the codebehind throws validation/formatting hissy fits because it thinks its should be a stand along page. my CNTRL + K, CNTRL + D has broken on every page where I'm now sharing my master page. This is extremely frustring for me and the team
Related
I am taking over an MVC project for which there is no source code. All I have to do is remove all the existing functionalities of the MVC based website leaving just one page alone. Right now, I have decompiled the dll from production and I have a 'not so useful' type of code in my system which needs to be wired up completely.
I am wondering if it's possible to hide all the pages and hyperlinks through web.config just leaving the required page as such? The website looks like below:
I want to keep only the "State Fact Sheets" page removing rest of the pages. is it possible at all to do this in web.config file?
We are using umbraco 7.1.3
As per client's requirement we need to create more then 550 Umbraco CMS sites for different cities with same template and asp.net user control which access data from one master database.
So we created one windows application that will create 550+ sites as per city name under one Non-Umbraco root site.
We also managed to create different Umbraco database for each site is created and moved published code under to Non-Umbraco root site and convert to application and also updated Web.config file for each site dynamically.
After that when-ever we found that our logic or UI was not correct we also update DLL, ASCX user controls and CSS to all sites through same window application.
Till now everything was going smooth, but now we have one major change and that contains new document type, template, macro and new menu needs to be added dynamically. Updating published code through windows application was easy but we don't found any way to make update Umbraco database of 500+ sites through another application.
Some websites are already updated through respective sites owners, so without affected any existing changes we need to add new macro, content, document type and menu for each site and we don't know in which Umbraco database we need to enter records?
Had already posted the same in umbraco issue tracker #U4-7105
Also in Umbraco forums #71443
Thanks & Regard
Sounds like an interesting case!
If you want to migrate items that are in the database such as document types, templates and macros you would most likely need to get a product like Courier. I can see that due to license costs this could be an issue for you with 500+ sites.
Another option could be to take a look at uSync to see if it does what you need. I don't have much experience with this package but from the looks of it, it seems like it is handling all the database bits - and everything else (files on the file system) would be handled by your application just as it is right now.
I made an ASP.NET MVC application which allows user to create dynamic websites. I need to add feature which will allow to download from server off-line version of choosen website as static html files with menu, hyperlinks, images, documents etc. It should work similar to applications such as Teleport Pro, but I have to choose from Admin Panel which content should be export.
Client wants to burn static website on CD, save on pendrive.
Do you have any ideas how to begin? Please help.
I currently have implemented that in a current project...
User is able to change anything in the frontend and at the end he can publish and download the offline files... the site subscribe users and show all prizes, winners and more information about that campaign.
All was done in ASP.NET MVC3 under .NET4 and hosted in AppHarbor.
It's composed at several applications but for what you want, you develop the Backend and the Frontend, and to generate the static files, simple use the Frontend to grab the full HTML
As an example, I can show what 2 users did...
Callme.dk did http://callme.julekal.info and
Sony Nordic did http://sony.julekal.info
plus, you can simply point custom domains to it as well like http://sonynordicxmas.net/
To publish and generate all files:
one part of the editing:
So I give the users, offline access (through the .zip file), online access (through the frontend application) and the ability of using custom domains...
I think the only way this might be possible is if you go to every single page and then use your browser to "Save" the web page script and all.
However this causes several issues;
You never quite get everything and you need to massage the HTML produced, dowload all the images etc to get the page to look right
Each html file now has an associated folder with the same name and each time you do this you will get another html file with a folder. You can combine all the folders into a single one but that leads me to item 3.
You will need to edit each html file to clear up any pathing issues if you want to share a single source folder.
Data is no longer dynamic!
You need to, if you want to link all the pages to each other, edit every single html file and resolver the anchor tags.
This is too much work and I think it actually breaks the true requirement.
Don't do it! :)
Here is my scenerio..
We have an ASP.Net 2.x web site. We want to migrate it to Silverlight full frame application. However, there is no way we can go away in a corner and redo every web page in SL right off the bat.
What I would like to do is build the chrome of the app (main page, dashboard, login, common system/config screens, main menu) in SL and be able to open existing .aspx pages in the main content SL frame.
From what I see there is no way to do this. I thought the Webbrowser control in SL4 would be the answer, but apparently that only works if your app is run out of browser.
So, what is my best recourse? It seems like I will have to create some type of .aspx page that hosts the .XAP and pass in the page I want it to load?
How would you gurus approach this?
I would actually go the opposite route actually. Intead of building the full dashboard, i would begin building the dashboard elements separately as much as you can. This will give you time to refactor your individual applications one by one until you're ready to integrate them all.
One method we considered on my team was to build our SL rendering engine to render our aspx into SL controls, but when we saw the scope of that we decided it would be easier just to begin developing everything in SL from scratch.
I'm beginning to plan a complete redesign of our departments intranet pages. As it stands, every department gets their own folder within root. They all share the same look and feel but don't use CSS everything in each file is straight up static text. Basically, if a change has to be made to the header, every file must get changed. The number of files is somewhere in the hundreds. Since we're in the process of getting a new look & feel, I figured this would be the appropriate time to redesign the structure as a whole as well. My idea was to create a new C# Web Project to utilize the C# Master Pages. Within that project, each page would use the master page. Since I know they like to make many minor cosmetic changes, master pages would make things much simpler and quite frankly, I don't have time to manually edit a header 564 (random) times. The other aspect of this site is that the root would contain a documents folder within sub folders pertaining to each fo our departments.
Guess my question is, has anyone tackled an issue like this and could shed some light as to how they fixed it.
Also, would it be worth upgrading IIS and .NET to their latest version?
If you are already working in .NET 2.0, then you shouldn't need to do any upgrades, and there won't be any additional infrastructure cost.
I would highly recommend using Master pages, as they do make it painless to have a common look and feel for your entire site.
Another cool feature of Master pages is that you can nest them together. This would let you have a common feel between all pages. And then each department would have it's own Master page nested into your top-level page.
I'll start with the cost question. You need to be using ASP.NET 2.0 or higher to take advantage of master pages. Technically the .NET framework is free, however Visual Studio is not. Visual Web Developer is free, but the license might be for non-commercial projects only. I'm not sure. IIS is also free, Windows Server 2008 is not. You are fine running on XP or Server 2000/2003. There isn't really any reason to upgrade.
I can't say that I have tackled a problem exactly like yours, but it sounds like what you need is a content management system. Some examples are the cuyahoga project, or Umbraco. These systems allow you to create a general look and feel, and store all content in a database or xml files and provide an online content editor, so the content of the pages can be managed by people that don't necessarily know HTML or Programming.
You can have a master-page hierarchy:
Master page for everyone
Master page for department A
Master page for department B
Whatever's common for everyone you set in the first master page.
Then you make a master page for department A pages - this master page's master page is the first one.