03/08/2008 07:34:00
Wow.
It has been a number of years since I have even made an attempt to update the code for this website. Although I don't have a regular set of readers or anything, I still like to use this site as a demonstration of the fact that I can code in hopes that it may assist me in future employment opportunities. Ironically enough, I'm quite happy with my current position at AMECO but decided to refresh my website as I've suddenly had some of my hobby interest in writing code revitalized.
Why is this? It's simple really. I don't have a job that is slowly but surely sucking the life out of me (which is the best definition I can come up with for the effect my prior job was having on me). Therefore writing code has begun to make the transition back from a mundane business related activity that provides a respectable income to a well-loved and enjoyable hobby that I happen to be lucky enough to be doing for a living. It is interesting how a simple change of environment can result in such a drastic and life altering change of perspective.
So what's new? Well the short answer is a lot. Now for starters this code has not been released yet. That's for two reasons one of which is that the current beta is feature incomplete. That is because the entire application has been rewritten from scratch. I made the move from VB.NET and ASP.NET 1.1 to C# and ASP.NET 2.0. A bit of Microsoft's AJAX has been thrown in for flair as well, though you can expect to see more prevalent use of this technology in future builds. In addition to the rewrite, since this code is brand spanking new, I'm going to dogfood it awhile and let my creative juices swirl for a bit before going through the trouble of putting together a release that nobody is going to download :)
So what is missing? Well that's easy since only two pieces of functionality didn't make the cut for Beta 1. That would be the pop-up quote functionality that was present in the prior version as well as the forum functionality. The quote feature will return in the next version (I'm just mulling over a better UI method for making it part of the site). The forum feature may or may not. The backend DB related code has been rewritten but given the lack of usefulness of the feature, plus the fact I have no urge to moderate a forum, I'm not sure it is worth the trouble at this point. I'll think this over some more.
So again I hear you asking, what the hell is new? Okay here is the list of what has been reworked as part of the rewrite:
The entire site is now built using CSS stylesheets. There are no more table layouts. The code used in the two themes I have created for the site now are 100% compatible with Internet Explorer 7.0, Firefox 2.0 and the current public build of Safari for Windows/Mac.
Themes are based around a single pre-constructed CSS stylesheet and it's associated images. The CSV files and the auto-generated CSS files are gone forever.
The caching back end has been totally reworked. Instead of caching the whole database to a set of temporary XML files, a persistent on-demand cache is now maintained across application executions. This caching system is far more automated than the previous one and allows for simple deletion of existing caches once an associated piece of data changes. This is still highly experimental as it has not been 100% tested, but appears to work quite well.
All of the admin tools have had their UIs updated from "majorly retarded" to "reasonable decent designed" UIs. Yes I can actually design a decent UI for working with the data on this site.
Most of the functionality of this site is routed through an ASP.NET Update Panel which for the most part prevents full page postbacks allowing for a smoother end user experience.
All custom pagination of record lists have been replaced by the ASP.NET Gridview control and it's built in pagination. This makes for a much more pleasant and consistent user experience and also allowed me to remove a nice chunk of backend code dedicated to supporting this functionality.
Selecting a theme will now set a cookie for the next 30 days that will use that theme the next time you visit the site by default.
All application database files will now be stored in the App_Data. This was a good move given that this now prevents the MDB files from being download should the folder and the file name both be known. The XML data caches are also stored in this location.
All application settings are now stored in XML .config files per ASP.NET standards. No more settings.asp file!
No changes have been made to the backend database structure. This means that transitioning from one system to the other is quite simple.
Anyway this is a test of what is to come. Feel free to dig around. Oh and as always my imaginary readers, if you find any issues - feel free to pass them along!