Question

I am building a web business that has 4 web apps (sites) that interact with the same datbase and built-in forms Authentication. I was wondering what the best way to acheive this is?

One app/ site will be our backffice, where we manager our customers, their payments to us and their subscriptions.

The second site /app will be our public facing site which basically sells our service and allows them to register and/or pay for their site.

The third app /site is an administration site that will allow them to build their own web stores.

The fourth app will run our clients’ websites.

As per this discussion, http://forums.asp.net/t/1753900.aspx/1?multiple+projects+in+one+solutions, I beleive setting up five projects, one being a Class Library, which wil be referenced by the other four projects is the way to go but when I did this and moved the models folder to this class library, I got a bunch of errors when I tried to build the new library, such as:

The type or namespace name 'DataAnnotations' does not exist in the namespace 'System.ComponentModel' (are you missing an assembly reference?)
The type or namespace name 'Security' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Web' (are you missing an assembly reference?)
The type or namespace name 'Entity' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Data' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Moving shared tasks, such as authentication against the Membership database is the right way to go. The problems with missing References just means you need to add Project References to the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll, System.Web.dll, and System.Data.Objects.dll assemblies to your new library project (as library projects default to a small set of references).