MSDN Code Gallery

This Web Application Toolkit is designed to demonstrate how to extend an existing ASP.NET MVC Web application to provide access from mobile devices. To enable mobile access, the Web application should have views targeting each of the mobile devices to be supported. The MVC pattern helps you create applications that separate the different aspects of the application (input logic, business logic, and UI logic), while providing a loose coupling between these elements. The pattern specifies where each kind of logic should be located in the application. The UI logic belongs in the view. Input logic belongs in the controller. Business logic belongs in the model. This separation helps you manage complexity when you build an application, because it enables you to focus on one aspect of the implementation at a time. For example, you can focus on the view without depending on the business logic. In this Web Application Toolkit we use the MVC pattern to create several views targeting different kind of browsers reusing the same business logic. For this implementation, we use the ASP.NET MVC framework which provides an alternative to the ASP.NET Web Forms pattern for creating MVC-based Web applications. The ASP.NET MVC framework is a lightweight, highly testable presentation framework that is integrated with existing ASP.NET features, such as master pages and membership-based authentication. For extending the Web application to use mobile specific views, this sample provides a reusable component called MobileCapableViewEngine that enables the Web application to show the appropriate view depending on the device's browser that is performing the request.

Adding social capabilities to your Web site allows you to attract new users, keep them on your Web site for longer and get them to come back more often. This Web Application Toolkit shows how, using a few lines of code with the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, it is possible to add social capabilities to a Web site. The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit is a JavaScript based set of controls and libraries that allow a developer to quickly and easily add instant messaging to a Web site and harness the power of the Windows Live Messenger network that is used by 330 million users around the world. The Web Application Toolkit will also show how to bring information about users from Windows Live such as their presence, profile information and profile picture.

Web Application Toolkit for IE8 is designed to demonstrate how to implement the new features in Internet Explorer 8 (Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search Providers) to extend the reach of your Web site and services also to those users that are not on your site. This toolkit includes a set of ASP.NET Web controls for IE8 that you can use to take advantage of these new features in your own Web application.

When offering services via a Web site, a popular way to attract first time users is to offer a free version of the software that has limited functionality. A good way to convert that non-paying customer into a paying customer is to offer more functionality and features beyond what is available in the free version and allow the transition between versions to be seamless. This business model of delivering “basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features” is known as the Freemium business model. Often developers create custom branches of their core application to enable this type of functionality but this is not the most cost effective solution as maintaining two code-bases is expensive. The migration between different Stock-Keeping Units (SKUs) of the product might also require work on the part of the customer and this is another barrier to adoption. This Web Application Toolkit offers a more elegant and cost-effective way to solve this problem by using a SKU/Features matrix to manage which features are available in certain SKUs. The Toolkit makes it easy for the developer to ascertain which SKU the current user has paid for and also which functionality should therefore be available to them by using standard ASP.NET Role Management features together with WCF REST Services to retrieve the SKU/Features information. The Toolkit also provides reusable ASP.NET MVC views and controllers for developers to create admin experiences for managing the SKU/Feature matrix and page templates to explain to customers about the different SKUs or versions available. Please notice that functionality provided in this Toolkit is mostly oriented for integration within an ASP.NET MVC Web application.

Lots of Web sites store and display date information that is personal to their users. Users often want one place to manage their calendar for example Outlook, Windows Live Calendar, Google Calendar and so on. Web sites can make their experience more useful by allowing calendar clients to subscribe or import date information in standards-based formats so that information relating to their service is represented in a user’s primary calendar client. In other Web applications it may be necessary for a user to enter date information that is already in another service or calendaring client. By allowing a user to import or subscribe to a 3rd party calendaring information it makes it easier for the user and also increases the reliability of the data entry. The goal of this Web Application Toolkit is to provide a standards-based service that can be reused in your own Web application to expose calendaring and events information for different users, using different data formats (iCalendar, XML, JSON). This service follows the REST principles and supports different query string parameters for data filtering: dates range, results count, text query, and so on. Additionally, standing from the client-side, you’ll find examples of how to consume the endpoint using the Microsoft Ajax Library templates and the hCalendar microformat. This Toolkit uses the standard iCalendar format as one representation for the calendar information. However, for simplicity purposes it does not support the full iCalendar specification (only Events). Also notice that the REST Service included does not provide support for all the CRUD operations that would be desired in production environment scenarios. This Web Application Toolkit assumes that the developer has basic experience with Windows Communication Foundation and the REST architecture style.