Update

The project has been put on hold while I research BlogEngine.net and get my website to where I'd like to have it then I'll come back to application development.

Original

It's taking longer that I thought to get out the first release. ahhh.

 I've got the whole day tomorrow, hopefully I'll upload it.

The idea is simple, a public help button that can be used by any application developer giving there application a way of displaying help or infomation to there users.

First let me define the problem, it seems to be a public problem as well.

So many applications public, open source or even commercial apps don't have help/information systems in their application.  I'm even to blame I don't have help notes in most of my apps. It's not that I don't want too; it's just that I add them as the need arises, obviously this is a problem. More...

I just added a new BlogEngine.NET extension to my blog that adds socal book marking to get the extension go here

The extension adds a button that will list links to all the major bookmarking sites, it does this using AddThis.com.

AddThis.com helps website publishers and bloggers spread their content across the web by making it easy for visitors to bookmark and share content to their favorite social destinations.

... and the dreams contine.

Kobe Starter Kit sounds very interesting, pulled the following off the kobe home page

Project Kobe is a getting started resource kit for planning, architecting, and implementing Web 2.0 applications and services using the Microsoft Platform. This resource kit is targeted toward technology decision makers, hands-on solution architects, development managers, and developers in the aspiring web startups community and in enterprises and businesses looking to invest in new Web 2.0 application/service development projects

That just sounds great and I can't wait.

I went searching today and found a great post on "Project Kobe community feedback" and I wish this was on the project home page at at microsoft things would have made a little more sense.

I've enjoined following Omar's Dropthings project he is very generous to release an open source project like this and as far as I know it's the only asp.net open source start page of it's kind.

Now that he's done an overhaul I'm going to take another look at it and see what he's done.

I learned a great deal from the first version can't wait to see what's new.

Check out his book here

Read more about the overhaul here

I've started researching the various open source shopping carts. So far I've found that nopCommerce is by far the most feature rich open source shopping cart.  There's a couple contenders to consider but they aren't worth considering without the full payment features. So nopCommerce is what I'm going forward with.

The other open source shopping carts only give you a PayPal payment provider (the other payment providers are in there commercial version) I don't know about you but I don't have a customer that uses PayPal they all have merchant accounts and I need a solution that will work for any one of my customers most of them are small businesses with little to no computer knowledge, so the solution has to be as seamless as possible.

First let me give you a little background on what my customer's needs are and then I'll cover why I'm considering nopCommerce as the right solution for them.

I make it sound like I'm considering this for a long list of customer but I"m not I'm only considering it for one right now but my future customers will also benifit from my research.

My customer has a small beauty supply store and are considering selling products online but would like to the web site costs down to a minimum. There store is packed with products and by the looks of it every beauty product is there. I was very impressed with the various hair, skin and nail products they have. I didn't know so many variations existed.

There requirements are straight forward they want to create an online presence that will show case some of there products and at a later date they'll add a shopping cart. They want to add the shopping cart at a later date to try and save money on site startup costs. I'm hoping that nopCommerce will provide a solution that will allow my customer to just implement there e-commerce solution right from the start.

Now to nopCommerce. nopCommerce has all the features you'd expect from a shopping cart and so far has been easy to work with. 

Here's a partial list of the nopCommerce features you can get the full feature list here.

• Supports categories and manufacturers
• Categories can also be fully nested to any level desired (sub-categories)
• Products can be mapped to more than one category or manufacturer
• Products can be mapped to more than one category or manufacturer
• Multilingual support
• Multi currency support
• Measure weights, measure dimensions
• Real-time currency exchange rates (ECB)
• SSL support
• Export to XML
• Fully 100% customizable design using templates
• Configurable list of allowed countries
  • For registration
  • For billing
  • For shipping

Gotta go do the work thing.

Today I got the project working properly with FireFox and I am 98% Safari compatible.

You can download the code here (3.65 mb).

The issues where element.firstChild and element.nextSibling they where resolved using the following functions.

More...

I resolved the issue with master pages I was using clientId instead of uniqueid

here is a screen shoot of a web part being moved to another zone

Click here to download to latest version

Today I figured I'd add some style to the portal and while do so I ran into a bug. This bug showes up when you put the controls in a master page. I'm working on fixing the issue now and should have a fix soon.

Here is a screenshoot of the current theme.

1. http://www.singingeels.com/Articles/Membership_Using_ASPNET_AJAX.aspx
2. http://www.singingeels.com/Articles/Understanding_ASPNET_Web_Parts.aspx
3. http://www.carlosag.net/Articles/WebParts/connectionsTutorial.aspx
4. http://waitink.blogspot.com/2008/06/ajax-web-parts-part-1-drag-and-drop.html

I debating on removing the post back when a WebPart is dropped to another zone or zone index inside the current zone. It’s not needed and there are advantages on both sides. To post or not to post, well I’m thinking about, I’ll have an answer soon.

Here is the first version of the TFRPortal, it is still in beta but I figured I'd upload it anyways.

What I have done is create css friendly web parts with drag and drop support. The task of creating drag and drop support with divs took longer that I had anticipated, I had the bulk of it done in a few hours just the last like 5% took a day in itself. I think in the long run having css friendly web parts will save me time when I get to themes.

References I used while developing this project. I also debugged the .net framework to view how the Microsoft web parts worked.

1. Tableless WebParts and WebPartZones
2. Drag and Drop like iGoogle with ASP.Net Ajax Toolkit
3. Build Google IG like Ajax Start Page in 7 days using ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.0

Download the code here (955.55 kb)

The code download contains one main dll called TFR.Web.dll. This component consits of the following custom controls and components.

1. PartChrome.vb
2. WebPartManager.vb
3. WebPartManagerBehavior.js
4. WebPartManagerExtender.vb
5. WebPartZone.vb
6. ZoneButton.vb
7. ZoneLinkButton.vb

More...

At the very least I believe all projects should have a simple document outlining the project features and requirements, as what is show below.

The fist development challenge we will take on will be about is creating a dynamic web site with the following feature requirements.