I’m starting a somewhat greenfield web application that needs to run within a .net 3.5 webforms website, but otherwise will be detached in terms of interactivity with the current site. I am trying to design an architecture that would minimize or eliminate the use of webforms. So far I’ve come up with using wcf web services in json (web api is unfortunately not an option due to the 3.5 restriction) and having Knockout.js exclusively on the client side. Ideally I would not add aspx pages but straight html pages to build the UI front.
1) Is this possible/reasonable?
2) Would I be able to implement asp.net utility functionality like windows authentication and user roles access security using html pages with knockout.js instead of aspx pages?
If your looking to minimize the actual amount of work and prefer to keep things AS SIMPLE as possible I would recommend at least taking a look at using ServiceStack. It’ll do most everything you’ll want WebAPI to do but it runs on NET3.5 and it has different formats available to consume including SOAP (yeah, people still use that). The best part is you don’t have to write any other code to get all the formats. It has the ability to also output HTML as a format just as easily as it would JSON, JSV, XML, SOAP, etc.
You’d be good to employ Knockout.js and perhaps BreezeJS (http://www.breezejs.com) too for change tracking.
http://www.servicestack.net/