Opening the West Wind Web Store Solution

The Web Store comes as a VS.Net Solution that is made up of 6 projects. The main project is the Web Project with the other projects being the business objects and a set of support libraries. When you fire up VS.Net with you should see the Solution Explorer with 6 projects opened in it:

There are 6 projects total, of which only the wwWebStore and WebStoreBusiness projects are application specific. The other are utility class libraries and are optional and can be removed from the solution if you choose.

Here's a description of each project:

WestwindWebStore
This is the main Web application project using ASP.NET 2.0 stock projects. It contains the ASP.Net pages and controls, the Web Service and a redirection HTTP Module that allows you to re-route other extensions to the Web Store.

Westwind.WebStore.Business
These are the WebStore specific business objects that handle most of the store's logic. The core business objects include busInvoice, busCustomer, busLineItems etc. all of which inherit from the wwBusiness<T> business object base class. These business objects implement all business logic and data access. No direct data access happen in the Web applications itself - it all happens in this assembly.

Westwind.BusinessObjects
This assembly contains the base business and data access layer classes that provide the basis for all data access by the Web Store. The business object classes provide Data Provider independent data access to various backends. The key classes are wwBusiness<T>, wwBusiness and various provider specific wwDataXXX class implementations.

Westwind.Web.Controls
This assembly contains a number of custom controls. Among the controls provided is wwDataBinder (for two-way databinding support and binding error management), several AJAX related controls (wwHoverPanel, wwMethodCallback, wwModalDialog, wwDragPanel), wwTabControl (tabbed page interface), wwErrorDisplay (used for all error display) and a number of overrides for base ASP.NET controls.

Westwind.Tools
This assembly contains a number of utility classes for general purpose utilities. Among the utilities are: wwAppConfiguration (a strongly typed, writable Configuration settings manager), WebErrorHandler (used to capture and log ASP.NET errors), WebRequestLog (a request and error logging manager), wwSqlLightDataAccess (a lightweight single class DAL when using wwBusiness is overkill) and a number of general purpose utility classes for Web and general .NET tasks.

Westwind.InternetTools
This assembly contains a couple of classes that handle sophisticated client side HTTP access with a high level of abstraction as well as a low level SMTP implementation.

Getting Started with the project

The first step after installation should be to recompile the project. The project was set up with relative paths so that it should compile immediately after installation.

After compilation you're off to exploring the code and running the application.


 Last Updated: 3/4/2007 | Send topic feedback