The Asp Experiment: A year with ASP.net

Day 17: one step back and two steps forward

cjcunniff — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 04:41:57 +0000

So day 16 was my first failure. I have come to realize that finishing up school is going to require more time than I had hoped. Therefore, I am changing the project a bit as that has to be a priority for me. I am going to be making one post a week for the next 5 weeks. During each post I will thouroughly go through my progress so far, but it will save me a great deal of time in the long run that I desperatley need… so please don’t give up on me

The status update:

I have made huge strides in my programming endeavors. The following items are complete from a management standpoint:

Creating accounts
Editing accounts
Deleting accounts
Creating clients
Creating Concept Portfolios
Creating Pages within the Concept Portfolios

The following items are also complete from a user standpoint:

The ability to select a portfolio
The ability to view pages within a portfolio
the ability to add different types of comment boxes to a page (the ability to save, edit, delete, etc, is still forthcoming)

The Video (seeing it all start to come together):

Day 15: The include file

cjcunniff — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:00:53 +0000

I’m going to keep this post pretty simple. I created an include file for the primary navigation for the site. It wasn’t anything amazing. If you haven’t ever used an include file here is how it works:

By the way, make sure to give your thoughts on this week’s poll!

View This Poll

Day 14: Week 2 in Review

cjcunniff — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 01:40:47 +0000

Well…. it’s the end of week 2 and I’m making a huge amount of progress on my project. I’ve created a login page that can interact with the database and determine if a user is in the database and what their role type is. That way, when they login we can determine what areas of the website they should have access to.

Some challenges this week:

The biggest challenge I ran into was a really weird database error (sql error 4064). If you run into this freakishly strange error check out my post from Day 9 to see a much easier solution than anything else I saw online (I’m not really sure why people were making this so hard).

I’m also finding that time is becoming an increasing challenge for me in these blog posts. Primarily because I’m finishing up my undergrad degree and I have 5 more weeks where I’m doubling up on classes. So if my posts seem super short… well… to bad… not that many people are actually following this blog right now any ways (huge shout out of love for anyone following my progress!!!!)

That’s it for the week. Check out tomorrow for my next Poll!

Day 13: Building a login page part 1

cjcunniff — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:35:55 +0000

I sent out a post on facebook (username: cjcunniff… feel free to friend me), and asked my friends what they would like to see on my posts. Interestingly I found out that even though I’m new to asp.net, I’m not new to programming, so some of the things I’m already talking about were confusing for them. So I have decided to try to include some videos in my posts at least ever couple of days or so, to show what I’m talking about. I found a free program called CamStudio (if anybody knows of something better I would love to know about it… please… please… share!).

With that said, I have my first of a series of two to three videos on creating the login page, that I wanted to share with you. I would like to start working on adding audio or captions, but I haven’t figured that out just yet.

Day 12: The asp.net gridview

cjcunniff — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 02:57:34 +0000

The Good News:

One of my goals in this blog is not to get too awful technical if I can avoid it (so feel free to tell me if it is too dry, or if there is something you don’t quite understand. With that said, I figured one thing I would need for my experiment is a way to sort through users and potentially edit their information like passwords and usernames.

I was doing some research on one of the best video tutorial sites I’ve seen so far (http://www.asp.net/learn), and I found a tutorial on the GridView component. What is awesome about GridView is that it has a wizard that will let you select a database, create the connection to it, automatically make the columns sortable (so if you click username it sorts by that, or if you click password it sorts by that), and even makes it so you can easily edit that information.

I’ll probably look into how all of this works in more depth tomorrow, but I think it is going to give me the the perfect tool to accomplish my goal of letting people update information.

More to come tomorrow, but for now, comments, questions, and general thoughts are always welcome!

Day 11: Thinking a bit about security

cjcunniff — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 03:17:37 +0000

I work for a fairly decent sized interactive media company and in the last year, we have had two injection attacks penetrate our databases. I have come to realize that classic asp is just not effective at preventing these types of attacks (at least not very easily). The answer of course, lies in asp.net. I have found that once you are able to assign a login account to a username or role, it is very easy to set security. In my case I decided to take a fairly simplistic approach.

Here are the steps:

1) Open your web.config file.
2) Scroll to a section that reads:
3) I’m not sure if the location in the xml actually matters, but just in case put your security entries directly after this line.
4) My example has code that looks like the following:

Basically, what I am saying is that, from the root level of the server, the “admin” folder should have specific access rights. The important thing I learned is that once one rule is true, the rest are skipped. So if a user has a role of 1 (master admin in my case), then the other rules are ignored. So if the user or injection system have no role (or one that isn’t a 1 or 2, then they get sent back to the login screen.

I should also mention that for “forms based security to work”, you have to make a change to the web.config file to read:

OK… How can you help:

If you’re following along any thoughts or suggestions around security would be great! I also wouldn’t mind just a simple shout out!

Day 10: Setting up the Login Page

cjcunniff — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:40:52 +0000

I was able setup the basic login form. For the time being I decided to to just manually enter information into the database, and then work on creating forms to enter the information later. I’m uploading examples of the files. I should point out that there is a need to create a file called a global.asax file to get this to work (thanks to: the code project for the tutorial). I am including that file as well. From what I have been able to asertain, this file is used throughout the site, and the code I have in place will check the login credentials against the database value (1=master admin, 2=admin, 3=general user). You should also check out the web.config file, which I modified to only only certain users assigned to certain roles to gain access to certain folders.

The Download:

Logged In Example

Comments Appreciated:

I’m really looking for any thoughts any of you might have. If you have some thoughts on features to add or different ways to go about doing some of these things, please share it with this little community.

Day 9: New Resource I would recommend

cjcunniff — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:20:22 +0000

I ran across a great blog that I think is going to be helpful in the long run. I would highly recommend that you all take a look at ScottGu’s Blog.

Day 9: sql error 4064… What the $*&#

cjcunniff — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:04 +0000

Can I just say to Microsoft… SERIOUSLY?????

So I went in to start creating the login page today, and I ran into a stinking weird error. The database wouldn’t let me connect to it. I don’t mean just in the code, but literally, through Web Developer Express, I couldn’t connect. Well, I did some research online (thank you Google), and nothing that I found either: A) made any sense to me as a novice, B) helped with the problem. So I took a stab in the dark. Here is what you can do to get around the problem:

Delete the connection string out of your database (go to the database explorer, right click on the database, click delete)
Go into the physical folder where the database is stored and make a copy of the file.
Delete the old database, and rename the copy with a 2 before the extension
Now go into your web config file in the solution explorer of visual web developer and find the connection string to the original database connection string.
Finally, change the name of the database to connect to so that it also has the 2 before the extension.

That solved the problem, but needless to say it set me back a little bit from getting the login form working. That is coming soon.

The Question For You:

Have you run into weird issues while working with .net or MS-SQL? If so, what did you do to deal with it.

The Call For Help:

If anybody has any resources, suggested links, or tutorial locations you would suggest please send them my way. I will be created a resources page to include all of your suggestions.

Day 8: Setting Up The Login Master Template

cjcunniff — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:58:18 +0000

As promised on day 7, my next step in this project is to start adding some actual functionality. So far all I have done is do a little research and figure out some stuff that makes sense to me (of course just about anything can make sense until you start trying to actually do it… so here we go!).

I’m going to post the file for my login template for you to take a look at on day 9 (I want to get the login page built, because the default page will break without it). If you are thinking about trying to setup your own login system, feel free to use this one.

There is a great tutorial out on http://www.asp.net/ that walks you through working with security and another really good one on working with templates, and finally I would strongly suggest that you check out this video on the Login Control. I should warn you that I have a lot of front end code built into this file, so if you don’t know javascript, html, css, some of this code may not make sense. Shoot me any questions though if there is something on that front that I can help you with. I would love for this blog to become a general learning resource where people feel comfortable learning about web programming and development regardless of their level of expertise.

Ok… so inside of the main template file called conceptDisplay.master I have inserted the login controls outside of a content region. Basically, the way I understand this is that any page built using this master pages will automatically update any code that is created outside of the content regions, but any content I create in the new page can only be created inside of the content region which means that code will never be automatically updated if I update the masterpage (wow… I almost went cross-eyed trying to figure out how to say that). Here is the code:

Welcome:

Welcome: Guest

So there are basically two templates inside of the loginView. The first is what shows up if the user is logged in. In that case, I show them a link to logout and show their username. The second view is if they have not logged in (aka anonymous).

In case you are wondering how this works, the control I’m using automatically knows to send the user to a file called logIn.aspx (I think that is in a global config file somewhere, but it isn’t worth messing with for our purposes).

The Next Goal:

I’ll start working tomorrow on the functionality to log a user in. I have found a couple of potential tutorial resources online that should help me work in the group permissions on top of standard username and password stuff.

You Challenge:

If there is a direction you want me to go with this project or a suggestion for future functionality, feel free to toss it my way. If you are new to this blog, I have a good description for you in the about page and on the Day 1 post.