Chapter 1 introduces the Community Starter Kit (CSK), and shows how to install it so you are up and running.Chapter 2 takes us on a tour of the sample community website that ships with the CSK—the Lunar .NET community. This chapter is your orientation to the features and functionality provided by the CSK, and is our first step towards creating our own community website.

InChapter 3 we see how to administer the data that gets displayed by the CSK, and learn how to manage our community, and multiple communities on the same installation, through the various administration tools provided by the CSK.

The Community Starter Kit has been designed from the ground up to support easy integration of skins and styles, allowing you to change the look and feel of your site with ease. InChapter 4 we take a detailed look at themes, skins and the common controls that control the overall appearance of your site. Before we delve into the CSK framework and architecture, we have a quick walkthrough of implementing a completely new CSK site inChapter 5.

Understanding the core architecture of CSK is essential if you want to extend the system or even modify the existing code. InChapter 6 we’ll learn how the Community Starter Kit builds the client pages, and what are the major classes that drive it.

InChapter 7 we look inside one of the modules that ship with the CSK to gain an overall view of the structure of a CSK module.

With knowledge of how to work with the administrative features and an understanding of the inner workings of the CSK, inChapter 8 we move on to extending the CSK by creating a new module: a Frequently Asked Questions module. The strategies and principles learned in this chapter will prepare you for developing custom modules to add your own functionality to the CSK.

Creating a new module from scratch is not the only way to customize the CSK application, and inChapter 9, we look at customizing through the use of user control (.ASCX) files. The flexibility of the CSK is further demonstrated inChapter 10, where we build an RSS feed to syndicate the output from any part of the site.

The final chapter of the book,Chapter 11, shows how to deploy a CSK website to a production environment, and tackles preparing the web server, and deploying both the code and the database to your hosting setup.

This book has been written for ASP.NET developers with a sound grasp of C#. To use this book you need to have the following:

This book uses the C#, Visual Studio. NET version of the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit available from:

http://www.asp.net/StarterKits/DownloadCommunity.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

To install and run the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit, you will need the following:

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.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "The GetResponseInfo method call will retrieve enough information to populate the ServiceResponseInfo object".

If we have a block of code, it will be set as follows:

{
responseInfo = new ServiceResponseInfo();
if(!sectionInfo.IsSectionWebService)
{
responseInfo.ServiceTitle = "Unpublished";
responseInfo.ServiceDescription =
"Section is not published as a service.";
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines will be made bold:

if (Context != null)
{
SectionInfo objSectionInfo = (SectionInfo)Context.Items["SectionInfo"];
_text = objSectionInfo.Title;
if(objSectionInfo.IsSectionWebService)
{
_text += String.Format(
"&nbsp <a href=’{0}’><img src=’{1}’" +
"alt=’RSS Feed’></a>",
"communityRSS.ASPX",
CommunityGlobals.AppPath +
"/communities/common/images/xml.gif");
}

}

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: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

>xcopy /s *.* ..\stage

cd ..\stage

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