Dreamweaver ASP.NET User Management Systems: Creating Custom Encrypted Authentication Tickets

In the other tutorials in this series we explored the ASP.NET security model and utilizing it to build rich featured User Management Systems using Dreamweaver. We learned how to use the web.config file to configure security on ASP.NET web application. We learned how to authenticate a user using Forms Authentication method. We learned how to create cookie to hold a user’s role and how to create a custom Generic Identity object to maintain the user’s role authorization from one request to another. Finally we learned how use the role information and Generic Identity object to programmatically control our user experience. In this final tutorial in the series, we will build upon prior discussions as we take over the Forms Authentication Ticket creation process to create our own custom authentication ticket and encrypt it using the ASP.NET FormsAuthentication class. That said, this tutorial stands on it’s own in the presentation of the topics covered.

Before you get too involved, let’s see if you’re ready. This tutorial makes assumptions about your skill level--that is, this tutorial is intended for intermediate users. If you’ve never configured a new site in Dreamweaver, never configured a database connection string, or never used the Dreamweaver database connectivity tools, this tutorial is probably not for you as you’ll need to be familiar with these concepts and techniques. If you have done these things but have very little or no experience hand coding, writing SQL statements, using the Dreamweaver advanced Dataset Dialog, don’t worry we’re doing this together and I’ll do my part to bring you along.  

Using the ASP.NET Calendar Control

When building web applications, at some point during your requirements documentation you’ll probably come across the need for users to enter dates onto a form. Working with dates may seem like a simple task but it can quite easily become very complicated.

The reason date entry becomes complex is because of the validation that needs to be performed. In older languages this validation was provided by the developer. They had to consider all kinds of conditional checks, such as the number of days in the selected month, whether the selected February was in a leap year, as well as all the rules regarding leap years.

Fortunately, ASP.NET has made this style of date programming a thing of the past. The .NET framework has a built-in calendar component which provides all the basic functionality for most development scenarios and it comes pre-programmed with all of the aforementioned validation already in place.

By using this component the developer can focus on other aspects such as presentation and usability functionality instead of worrying about whether February 2028 has 28 or 29 days.

In this tutorial we’ll look at some of the basic functionality provided by the ASP.NET Calendar component and two basic examples of common usage of this component in web applications. We’ll also look at some of the basic formatting methods provided by the Date class.

Building a Data-Driven Navigation Menu

Navigation menus are the forefront of just about any website, whether the site is a dynamic database driven application or simply a personal homepage. They lead and direct your user around the pages of your site and provide the basis for your usability experience. A site that is difficult to navigate is a site that will not be popular with your users.

When working with ASP.NET you have a lot of extra flexibility when working with a navigation menu. In most development languages, your menu needs to be copied/pasted onto all of your pages, or at the very least you had to use include statements to place the menu at the top of every page. This process is very redundant and cumbersome.

ASP.NET offers the ability to create user controls, which are custom chunks of HTML and code-behind server logic which can be dragged/dropped onto any .aspx Web form in your application, making the development of a component such as a navigation menu quite easy, and very reusable.

In addition to a custom user control, you can add in your own server logic to extend the menu control even further and allow it to be data-driven from a database of your choice. This way your menu is rendered on-the-fly dynamically from records read from a database table which can be modified in real time.

In this tutorial we will build a sample application to demonstrate this powerful technique. We will build a custom user control to house our navigation menu which can be dropped onto any page in our application. And we will implement functionality to make our user control database driven from an Access .mdb database, rendering menu items and submenu items dynamically.

ASP.NET Image Gallery, Uploader & Thumbnailer Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of our demonstration image gallery creator, image uploader and thumbnailer application built in ASP.NET. As we’ve seen so far, we’ve been able to provide thumbnailing and image sharpening methods using built in objects that are part of the .NET framework.

To summarize, in part 1 we created an ASP.NET application called ImgThumbail and setup a folder structure for uploading images to the web server. We then added an ImageUtil class which can receive HttpPostedFile objects and create thumbnails for the images returning the binary content which can be written to the file system. We also implemented a method which uses a math algorithm to sharpen the image.

In part 2, we’ll continue building upon our application by developing the user interface and putting our ImageUtil class into action. We’ll build a web page which allows a user to upload an image to the web server, and then display those images dynamically in an HTML table constructed on-the-fly through code.

Once again Visual Studio.NET is required for this part of the tutorial, and both VB.NET and C# code samples will be provided.

ASP.NET Image Gallery, Uploader & Thumbnailer Part 1

Working with images is a requirement of many applications, from business software to simple personal web pages. There are hundreds of different implementations of this feature, some good, others not so good. When using images in ASP.NET applications you have the added benefit of making things a little easier on yourself by using a more object oriented approach so that you can create components that you can reuse in other applications.

Depending on the requirements of your images module it may be necessary to look towards third party components. There is literally hundreds of ASP.NET third party controls which deal with imaging, image uploading and image manipulation. Before you implement a costly third party component it’s important to understand what you can and cannot do with the existing .NET framework.

The purpose of this article is to show 3 basic imaging techniques you can implement in your applications which all make use of the existing .NET framework classes. These three techniques are: uploading, thumbnailing, and dynamic display (gallery).

For this article we’ll build a simple demonstration ASP.NET application where you can upload an image into a specific folder on the web server, have that image automatically thumbnailed on the fly, and then have the image thumbnails rendered into an HTML dynamically. These are the basic building blocks of most applications utilizing images.