Dreamweaver ASP.NET User Management System: Emailing Lost Passwords

In this tutorial, the third in my series on Forms based User Authentication and Authorization with Dreamweaver and ASP.NET, we’ll learn how to build an “Email Lost Password” page to complete our User Management System. If you have not yet read the first of this series, “Multi-Level Forms Authentication with Dreamweaver and ASP.NET: Roles Logins”, or the second Dreamweaver ASP.NET User Management System: Creating and Managing User Groups, I recommend you do so as this tutorial will build upon in earlier in depth discussions of the concepts involved. That said, this tutorial stands on it’s own in the presentation of the topics covered. If you already know how to configure your web site for forms authentication security and roles using the web.config, how to log those users in and associate the user’s identity and role, and how to control the user’s browsing experience programmatically based upon user identity, how to create new users and mange their group membership, then the first two tutorials are probably not for you. 

Before we get started, let’s see if you’re ready. This tutorial makes some assumptions about your skill level--that is, this tutorial is intended for intermediate users. If you’ve never configured a new site in Dreamweaver, never configured a database connection string, or never used the Dreamweaver database connectivity tools, this tutorial is probably not for you as you’ll need to be familiar with these concepts and techniques. If you have done these things but have very little or no experience hand coding, writing SQL statements, using the Dreamweaver advanced Dataset Dialog, don’t worry we’re doing this together and I’ll to do my part to bring you along.

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ASP.NET for Beginners

The purpose of this tutorial therefore is to give new developers or even veteran developers looking for a refresher, a very basic look at the core features and functionality of ASP.NET 1.1. We’ll review some of the theory and key concepts to ASP.NET and look at 2 very basic code examples.

We’ll try to unravel some of the mysteries behind what is going on when you use the types of features in ASP.NET so you have a more clear understanding of how to take the knowledge and apply it in your own applications.

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Dialogue Boxes in ASP.NET

Dialogue boxes are a fundamental part of any application, whether it be a desktop or web application.  They provide a basic level of interaction between the application and the end user, allowing the user to control basic application flow through various messages.

Web applications in general often make it difficult to implement even basic functionality that is easily provided in the desktop world due to the single request/response methodology in a thin client/server model. To make matters worse, the ASP.NET postback pattern makes it even more difficult to customize page flow.

Although the postback pattern in ASP.NET has made a world of improvements in everyday basic development, it has also created several new shortcomings and limitations that require some trickery and creativity to make certain features work.

Adding even further to the limitations of the postback pattern is the use of JavaScript by the .NET framework to control most user interface events. Clicking a button for example executes some JavaScript which reloads the page, sending a postback event to the server.

The reason this complicates matters so much is because most developers turn to JavaScript when implementing basic client side features, such as confirmations, alerts and popups. Tying into the existing JavaScript used by the .NET framework isn’t always the easiest and requires a thorough understanding of the JavaScript utilized by .NET on web form controls.

In this tutorial we will look at 3 different methods of providing basic user input and interaction using JavaScript and ASP.NET controls. We will look at how we can append our own functionality to the built in .NET JavaScript functionality provided by ASP.NET user controls.

The 3 examples we will look at are as follows:

1)       Alert information display

2)       Confirmation conditional processing

3)       Modal Dialogue Popup window with conditional processing

Although this tutorial is built using ASP.NET with Visual Studio .NET, the code required is extremely simplistic and the functionality is geared more towards JavaScript client side code.

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Dreamweaver ASP.NET User Management System: Creating and Managing User Groups

Managing users and user groups users is necessary on a number of websites, for instance the one you’re using now has different user groups with different duties and levels or authority. If you’ve spent much time developing with Dreamweaver and Classic ASP, you used Dreamweaver’s built in support for user management. If you wanted to create a new user, it was only a point and a click away in the Server Behaviours drop down. Imagine my surprise when, while building my first ASP.NET application, I found no such behaviour I could simply apply. No, I had to figure it out myself and it was far too late to add any extra money to the project budget for overtime! As it turned out, with careful thought and a few Google searches, I was able to craft a page that added new users without duplicates and without killing my weekend.

In this tutorial, the second in my series on Forms based User Authentication and Authorization with Dreamweaver and ASP.NET, we’ll learn how to build a “Create New User” page and a User Management System for assigning Roles to new users by joining them to user groups. If you have not yet read the first of this series, “Multi-Level Forms Authentication with Dreamweaver and ASP.NET: Roles Logins”, I recommend you do so as this tutorial will build upon in depth discussions of the concepts involved found in the first tutorial.

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Creating a Stateful Web Service

Creating a Stateful Web Service

One of the problems in web development is the server-client model, or specifically the thin-client model. Where thin client refers to the web browser being used to access your application. This style of client-server model is a stateless model, meaning that no information (state) can be retained across multiple requests to the server.

This is essentially how the web functions, and it creates several inconveniences in development due to the workarounds that can be implemented. Most developers are familiar with the session object, which is a uniform concept in web applications that can be found in most development languages. Session variables allow your application to become stateful because you can store information for each individual user and persist that information across multiple requests.

Note: This tutorial requires Visual Studio.NET. Both VB.NET and C# code will be provided for both the Web service application as well as the consumer ASP.NET application

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