software-as-a-service

When building a hosted/SAS application, how do you manage multiple versions when customizations by the customer are allowed?

Let's imagine you are building a Calculator application. You will allow customers to customize this Calculator with their own logos and CSS stylesheets. Customers will point their domains to your hosted Calculator and the application will serve up the correct theme for each customer. For example: www.AcmeCalculator.com will serve up th...

How to do Basecamp-style accounts in Asp.Net Mvc?

For an Asp.Net software as a service application, I want to do account based subdomains like Basecamp and the rest of the 37Signals products have. E.g. acme.myapp.com will load the account for that customer and pull back only their information. This is easy to do in Ruby on Rails, but how would you handle this functionality in ASP.NET ...

Tracking User's Actions in a Business Application

The company I work for is redesigning our application in .NET. Our application is sold using the Software as a Service model. We track all of our users actions in the software for reporting purposes (searching for things, downloading assets, completing forms, what is associated with the form they are creating, snap shot of the user's pr...

Does my fat-client application belong in the MVC pattern?

The web-based application I’m currently working on is growing arms and legs! It’s basically an administration system which helps users to keep track of bookings, user accounts, invoicing etc. It can also be accessed via a couple of different websites using a fairly crude API. The fat-client design loosely follows the MVC pattern (or per...

Ideas Needed for a Base Code System

I've developed a PHP web application that is currently in need of a strategic restructuring. Currently when we setup new clients we give them the entire code base on a subdomain of our main domain and create a new table for them in the database. This results in each client having the entire codebase, meaning when we make bug changes, f...