Keeping DRY with ASP.NET and multiple projects.
At the company I work for we are in the process of moving from Classic ASP to ASP.NET for our large intranet site.
There are currently two developers working with this intranet site at this time and we do not currently use any form of source control other than communicating to each other which projects we are currently working on. I’m not sure if we are going to get approval to use Team Foundation Server or any other source control system yet.
Our site currently consists of a mix of single static content and single dynamic content pages.
In addition there are approximately 50 different web applications all used by various departments throughout the company. These all range in complexity from single page forms all the way to very complex multiple page applications with various levels of report generating capabilities.
All of these web pages share a common layout, basic javascript, css, header, footer, and sidebar. I’d like to follow the DRY principles as much as possible to aid in redesigns or changes to the shared header, footer and sidebar.
My guess is that we will end up having a mix of HTML, Classic ASP, .NET Webforms and .NET MVC applications all housed on one server under the same domain name.
Goals:
- Master Pages / _Layout.cshtml – Share a single master page and an MVC layout page among the various webforms and/or MVC applications. I don’t mind having to maintain one master page for Webforms and a Layout page for MVC.
- Header, Footer, Sidebar – If I can’t easily share the Master/_Layout page. I want to share at least the header, footer and sidebar among all the various pages so they can easily be updated sitewide.
- Publishing changes for single applications – I’d rather not have to publish the entire site and all of the various applications every time I make a change to one of the applications. Is there a way to retain this functionality and still achieve goals 1 and/or 2?
If you can please tailor your answers for someone with almost no experience working with ASP.NET Webforms, MVC and C#. I have completed several tutorials but am still very much in the beginning stages of the learning process.
Thanks for any help that you can offer it is greatly appreciated.
To achieve all three requirements you’d have to have your layouts in a separate project that will be common for all other your projects.
Take a look at this article, which explains how you can compile views into a dll.
Once this is done, you’ll be able to share this dll file between the rest of your applications, thus sharing layout pages, which will have header, footer and sidebar.
Put all your other MVC application in separate projects as well (You can still keep them all under a single solution), so that you can build and deploy them separately.