Sunday, July 31, 2011

One third through the ASP.NET MVC 3 book

One third through the ASP.NET MVC 3 book I've been reading since my last update.

Why am I reading through this book before restarting the development of the My-MSI.Net web site?

Well, one reason is that the MVC framework changed a heck of a lot between version 1 and version 3!

Actually, the site development will go a bit faster with MVC 3 than it was going with MVC 1.

Using MVC makes the signup process more seamless than the ASP.Net version was. What whould you prefer: http://www.my-msi.net/Join.aspx?s=n (where n = 1 .. 4) or the more secure http://www.my-msi.net/Join? Now there is only one url change and that happens when you get redirected to Amazon, our payment processor. Amazon will be redirecting to a private payment confirmation page on the site which will collect the payment particualars and redirect to the next page in the Join sequence.

I know that people have been trying to 'skip ahead' in the Join process on the old site, and that is one thing the new MVC site will be addressing.

I may be spending the next two weeks finishing this Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 book, so don't be surpised if we go three weeks without a new post. I will be back, but likely not before I finish this book and start making progress on the actual site again.

Friday, July 22, 2011

We're back on track now...

Yep, we're almost back on track.

The Pro MVC 3.0 book arrived yesterday and as I suspected, to use MVC 3.0, I would have to upgrade the compiler to Visual Studio 2010. This installation finished while I was writing this post.

So I expect to get the project at least back to a running state today in preperation to getting started on porting the Back Office to MVC 3.0 next week.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Something went very wrong yesterday, but don't worrry, a solution is on order...

Something went very wrong yesterday after I installed MVC 3 on my computer.

All of the sudden all of my typed views were getting only Object data which isn't all that useful if you know anything at all about .Net.

Don't worrry though, before I left the computer yesterday, I did manage to order Pro MVC 3 from Amazon and it should be here sometime next week. I will be reading the book when it arrives at least until I see how to solve the current issue with the site, then I get back to working on the site again.

--
Eric
The Admin for http:www.my-msi.net

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Progress made Today!

Progress was made today!

The MemberInfo.ascx is now appearing on the Master page for the site as intended and the member photos are working as well.

Something change the Menu though and I'll be looking into that tomorrow. When I first started working on this MVC site, the menu was [Home] [Matrix] [Products] [Testimonials] [About] [Join]. Somehow that changed to:
[Home]
[Matrix]
[Products]
[Testimonials]
[About]
[Join]

I have no idea of what changed, but will be looking into that tomorrow.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Not so much progress over the weekend but things are progressing now...

I tried a few things that didn't work at all over the weekend. And it wasn't until this morning that I got the new site mostly back to where it was on Friday! At least I now understand what went wrong.

Adding a data type to your MVC Maser Page tends to break all of your menu links!

On Monday, I decided that the most complicated page Join.aspx would be better off on it's own controller, and I think that the Testimonials page will need it's own controller as well, but that won't happen until tomorrow.

For now, I'm posting to the MVC forum on the subject of How to get data on a MVC Master Page.
One suggestion looked promissing, but now I need to find a way to get a valid Request or Response object insde a Controller constructor, and until this can be resolved it's going to be a while before I can get the site working again.

Friday, July 8, 2011

What happened to My-MSI.Net

Well, with the slow economy even the benefactor of this site has fallen on hard times.

In the meantime, I've been working to address some of the techical issues we've become aware of with the current site's design.

By moving the site to ASP.Net MVC, we've been able to make the Join step much cleaner:
http://www.my-msi.net/Home/Join is the only thing people will see for all the steps in the Join process, which is much better than: http://www.my-msi.net/JoinMy-MSI?s=#

We will also start salting the passwords (and possibly encrypting other info) when the site relaunches, hopefully sometime in the late Fall to early Winter timeframe.

By moving from VS 2005 to VS 2010 for the site, we should be able to integrate Twitter into the site at some point.

The products will likely be upgraded to VS 2010. Each application will be updated to salted-hash the password before it is sent to the server. This will also require a change to the Web Service that each application communicates with.

The Web Service will also need to be updated to use the same salts when hashing the pasword to compare with the version stored in the database.

Where are we today? Well I have the public side of the site working well. I am in the process of converting some ancillary pages.

What's up for next week? The private side of the site, otherwise known as the: Back Office which only members have access to.

I plan to update this blog at least twice per week, tenitively on Monday and again on Friday, but this is definately not cast in stone.

Until next time....

Eric, the Administrator for My-MSI.Net
my.msi.net@gmail.com