Best practices to design component based asp.net application

Question

Hi all ,

I am starting to design my own CMS , and i want it to be modular to add more functionality later by me or by any other developer

I put my eyes on joomla CMS (very popular ,robust and extensible)

I want to make a CMS with asp.net to be just skeleton and all functions are done through components

Functions like :-

User management
Content Management ,editing and display etc.

My main idea is to let the skeleton to know from the query URL the required component and pass all other parameters to it and the component do the rest (parse parameters display results etc.)

the problem is how to achieve this how to call the component and and how to let it render its UI and pass it to the skeleton to put it in the appropriate place in the main site template

Please give me some practical advices not just theories

Answer 1

Practical advice: dissect N2, Orchad (the latter is way too overengineered, IMO) or any other open-source .NET CMS.

Answer 2

I'm with TheCloudlessSky; if you cannot take another product and figure out how it works then it's highly unlikely that you're in a position to start from scratch in building a similar product.

In answer to your question though, google or bing for .net plugin architecture and see where that leads you; you'll be in a world of interfaces and reflection so if these terms don't mean anything to you google or bing these first.

Answer 3

You might check out Dusty's ASP.NET MVC CMS project here: http://www.polemus.net/2010/08/aspnet-mvc-2-content-management-system.html

Related to that, I wrote a tutorial about using MVC to load plugins here: http://fzysqr.com/2010/04/26/asp-net-mvc2-plugin-architecture-tutorial/

Like Scott says, lots of reflection and interfaces. Download the code, load it up in the debugger, and step through it. There is no better way to learn.

Answer 4

I'd suggest to start with reading following books: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture;

Pro ASP.NET 4 CMS: Advanced Techniques for C# Developers Using the .NET 4 Framework, 9781430227120 (1430227125), Apress, 2010

also, reviewing of some open-source CMS implementations would be helpful.