One of my resolutions that I didn’t mentioned in my previous post about “Things I’m going to do in 2009” is to upgrade my portal to ASP.NET 3.5 add some great features to it.
But as a matter of fact, it hadn’t has a name because the portal was not my main goal and I really didn’t have any plan for it till a few weeks ago. Because I’m going to release this version officially, I decided to select a name for it. I researched a lot about a good name and found lots of names! Finally and after lots of researches, I’ve selected System.Web.Portal and think it’s a good name for it.
I’ve seen lots of portals and have worked with most of them such as DotNetNuke, Rainbow, etc. and realized that these portals are only good for those who are a normal user and don’t want to develop anything under these portals. Also these portals have some kind of limitations such as the database limitations and more.
In System.Web.Portal it’ll be easy like a piece of cake to develop modules, controls, providers, etc. and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
In the first version of this portal witch will be available in few months, I’m going to use the following technologies:
ASP.NET 3.5 Web Forms
I’m going to use ASP.NET Web Forms in this project and as a matter of fact, I don’t want to move into ASP.NET MVC or any other alternative solutions but a developer with a knowledge of ASP.NET can develop an ASP.NET MVC version because it’ll be so easy to develop under this platform!
LINQ
I think it’s now time to leave some interesting things such as DataSet, DataTable, etc. and move to LINQ because of its ease-of-use. The first version of this portal will have two providers; a provider for Microsoft SQL Server and one for XML and I’m going to use LINQ in order to do so. Besides, the next versions will support some other database engines like Sqlite, VistaDB, FireBird SQL, Oracle and more.
Compatible With Mono
First of all, Lets see what is mono:
Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. It is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. We feel that by embracing a successful, standardized software platform, we can lower the barriers to producing great applications for Linux.
More info: http://www.mono-project.com/What_is_Mono
This portal will be writing in C# 3.0 which is completely supported by Mono. It means you can also run this portal in Linux, Sun Solaris and any other platforms you want!
All you’ll need is to create a provider for your database like MySQL (that of more common in Linux) and then enjoy! You don’t want? The default XML provider is supported in all platforms; so don’t change anything if you’re not going to use any specific database.
There are some other great features in this portal that you’ll see in the first release of this project.