The IBuySpy Portal

The IBuySpy portal is a configurable Web portal for an intranet or the Internet that's built out of custom user controls. By default, it's designed as an employee portal for the fictitious IBuySpy company, but you can easily replace the content to create your own custom portal. It even includes ASP.NET administration pages that enable you to customize the content and layout for the portal without altering a line of code. As with all Microsoft case studies, you are free to take as much or as little code as you would like to reuse in your own applications; nothing is restricted or licensed.

Note

A portal is a Web site that acts as a hub for a cluster of information organized around some central theme. For example, you might create a company-specific site used by a programming team that contains information such as company bulletins, software development notes, downloadable utilities, contact information, and project deadlines. The portal would combine this information into a small set of pages, allowing a user easy access to a wealth of related information.

In many respects, the IBuySpy portal is more complex than the IBuySpy store. This results from the extreme configurability of the portal. Essentially, the IBuySpy portal site consists of user controls that are loaded dynamically into configurable "slots" on the page. A database determines every aspect of the interface, including the back-end user controls that should be loaded, their positions, and the back-end content. You can easily add your own user control to the page just by adding a record to the database.

As with the IBuySpy store, the IBuySpy portal (shown in Figure 19-2) is primarily of interest to distributed programmers who want a solid example of layered data access and ADO.NET programming. The IBuySpy portal uses output caching, like the IBuySpy store does, but it doesn't include any XML Web services.

Figure 19-2. The IBuySpy portal