Social networking has become a driving force on the Internet. Many people are part of at least one social network, while more often people are members of many different communities. For this reason many business people are trying to capitalize on this movement and are in a rush to put up their own social network. As the growth of social networks continues, we have started to see more and more niche communities popping up all over in favor of the larger, all-encompassing networks in an attempt to capture a sliver of the market.
In this book, we will discuss the many aspects and features of what makes up the majority of today's social networks or online communities. Not only will we discuss the features, their purpose, and how to go about building them, but we will also take a look at the construction of these features from a large scale enterprise perspective. The goal is to discuss the creation of a community in a scalable fashion.
Chapter 1, Social Networking gives you an overall structure of this book, that is, what a reader can expect from this book.
Chapter 2, An Enterprise Approach to our Community Framework helps you create an enterprise framework to handle the needs of most web applications. It discusses design patterns, best practices, and certain tools to make things easier. It also covers error handling and logging.
Chapter 3, User Accounts covers registration and account creation process by means of an email verification system and a permission system to ensure security. It also touches upon password encryption/decryption techniques.
Chapter 4, User Profiles covers the creation of a user's profile and an avatar in a manner that is flexible enough for all systems to use. In this chapter, we also implement some form of privacy to allow users to hide parts of their profile that they don't want to share with others.
Chapter 5, Friends shows you how to implement friends, how to search for them, find them in the site's listings, and import your contacts into the site to find your friends.
Chapter 6, Messaging helps you create a messaging system that will resemble a web-based email application similar to Hotmail or Gmail. We will also learn how to implement the Xinha WYSIWYG editor in a way that can be re-used easily across the site for complex inputs.
Chapter 7, Media Galleries covers details on how to build a generic media management system that will allow you to host video, photos, resumes, or any number of physical files with minimal tweaking. It also addresses the issue of multi-file uploads via RIA technologies like Flash and Silverlight.
Chapter 8, Blogs is all about Blogging. With search engines, users, and security in mind, we invest a part of this chapter to address an issue that plagues many dynamic websites—query string data being used to determine page output.
Chapter 9, Forums discusses the creation of the core features of a discussion forum—categories, forums, threads, and posts. Along with these features, the chapter also extends the friendly URLs concept to make our content more suitable for search engine optimization.
Chapter 10, Groups covers the concept of Groups. It focuses on how groups can be used to bring many different systems together in a way to start creation of sub-communities.
Chapter 11, User Interactivity helps us build controls to allow our users to express their opinions about various content areas of our site—tagging, rating, commenting, voting and mark as answer. It also discusses how these in turn allow users to earn medals and hence reputation on the site.
Chapter 12, Moderation focuses on Moderation, that is, the means to manage community provided content using a very simple flagging tool. It also covers methods such as Gagging to deal with habitual rule breakers. It also takes a look at how to filter specific words from content on the site.
Chapter 13, Scaling discusses some concepts to help you support a large number of users on your social network. It starts by looking at some key concepts of tiered architecture and web farming. It also discusses ways to create and search indexed data, methods to optimize data retrieval and content creation, and some mail queuing concepts.
Appendix covers a discussion on the Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and MVC patterns and explains why we continued to use the MVP pattern for this book.
This book describes how to build a Social Network using Microsoft ASP.NET 4, Microsoft C# 4, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. To use this book effectively, you will need access to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. Most of this book can be used with the various Express editions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Express, but you will find that having the Professional edition of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 will make your work flow more efficient. As we are not just discussing Microsoft ASP.NET, but are instead more interested in what is needed for the features of social networking, there may be times when we turn to an open source solution. All the examples in this book will clearly point out where to get the needed software, and how to configure that software as we work through our examples.
This book is written for Microsoft ASP.NET and C# developers who want to build an enterprise-grade Social Network, either for their own business purposes or as a contract job for another company. The book assumes you have prior experience of developing web applications using Microsoft ASP.NET 4, Microsoft C# 4, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010; it focuses on topics that will be of interest to existing developers—not on providing step-by-step examples for each detail.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Create a new class in the Fisharoo/BusinessLogic directory called ProfileService."
A block of code will be set as follows:
if (profile != null && profile.ProfileID > 0)
{
attributes = _profileAttributeService. GetProfileAttributesByProfileID (profile.ProfileID);
levelOfExperienceType =
_levelOfExperienceTypeRepository. GetLevelOfExperienceTypeByID (profile.LevelOfExperienceTypeID);
profile.Attributes = attributes;
profile.LevelOfExperienceType = levelOfExperienceType;
}
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
Account account = _accountService.GetAccountByID(AccountID);
Profile profile = _profileService.LoadProfileByAccountID(AccountID);
if(profile != null)
{
account.Profile = profile;
}
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this:
"Click the Test Connection button to see if your settings are acceptable."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this
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