Web Development .NET Best Practices

Question

Are there other example projects like the Northwind Starters kit around that show you 'best practices' (layers, unit tests, mocking data, o/r mapping tools, ...) in architecture of ASP.NET development?

Or links to good and clear resources or documentation? (MSDN is a good reference but no good as tutorial)

• are there example projects around addressing Visual Studio2008 and/or the AdventureWorks database?

thx, Lieven Cardoen

Answer 1

Check out this Sample Application: DinnerNow.Net

DinnerNow is a fictitious marketplace where customers can order food from local restaurants for delivery to their home or office. This sample is designed to demonstrate how you can develop a connected application using several new Microsoft technologies.

The demo utilizes several technologies including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, LINQ, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows PowerShell, and the .NET Compact Framework.

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Here is also a link to multiple Sample Projects and Starter Kits that utilize Asp.Net and related Web Development technologies

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Here are also some links to get you reading:

• Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications
• ASP.NET Best Practices for High Performance Applications
• ASP.NET Best Practices (PPT Presentation)
• Best Practice Resources For ASP.NET

Answer 2

Addition to Microsoft ASP.NET Starter Kits, here is two important open source ASP.NET Application to check :

DotNetNuke

BlogEngine.NET

Also here is Microsoft's Patterns'n Practices team's Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services. Very helpful guide for .NET applications.

Answer 3

Microsoft has a whole slew of sample projects, white papers, etc. covering best practices on a variety of topics. Many of these are focused on ASP.NET but you'll probably want to go right to the MS Best Practices center. They also published a book covering the topic but it is quite old and I wouldn't recommend it any longer.

Of course, you may want to go right to the source for an overall approach to coding best practices and for that I'd recommend Martin and Martin's Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#. I'm just finishing up Robert Martin's Clean Code and, while a fair amount is obvious, it is well written, has tons of examples and has helped push me to be more "craftsmanlike" in my approach to coding.

The last thing is that I consider good Unit Testing to be one of the bedrock "best practices" for any developer. I recommend Pragmatic Unit Testing by Hunt and Thomas there.

That should get you going!

Answer 4

I would recommend the book Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 by Omar Al Zabir.
His blog on ASP.NET Ajax and .NET 3.5 is also very valuable.

Answer 5

If you have an existing project then you could try FxCop. It's static code analyser (it means you provide him with compiled assemblies) and it checks for lots of rules and Microsoft Design Guidelines errors.