Buiding Forums in ASP.NET and VB.NET

[saif44]

Hi Folks:

I am desparetly looking for some help on how to build Forums using ASP.NET and VB.NET. Please help is need very urgently for my project at the college.

Thank you very much in advance

[dparsons]

This is a question that seems to be coming up more and more. Unfortunately I do not know of any VB.NET boards that are open source (PHP has one ala www.phpbb.com) that you could use as a reference however, when you think about it, a forum is actually ruidementary calls to a database and an interface to display those posts.

At the most basic level you need a Users table that will contain your user information and you will authenticate people against that.

You will have a table of top level categories (in P2P regards they have C#, VB, ASP.NET, XML, etc)

A table that will have categories related to the top level categories (In the case of the ASP.NET forum we have 1.1 Beginner and Professional 2.0 Beginner and Professional etc)

Another table that contains the threads of the given forum (this is related to the forum)

And, lastly, a table that contains the the posts to threads, etc which is related to the above threads table.

The methods for retrivieng this data is truly ruidmentary.

hth



-------------------------
I will only tell you how to do it, not do it for you.
Unless, of course, you want to hire me to do work for you.

^^Thats my signature

[jminatel]

I'd suggest looking at DotNetNuke:
www.dotnetnuke.com
and one of our Wrox DotNetNuke books:
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTit...471788163.html
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTit...764595636.html

or look at the book ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results:
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTit...471749516.html
The projects in Instant Results are:
Online diary and organizer
File share
Chat server
Survey engine
CMS
Blog
Photo album
Customer support site
WebShop
Appointment booking system
Greeting cards
Bug base
so while there isn't a specific "forums" project there are enough projects similar to forums that you could probably build forums from it. Perhaps some variation of the chat room application in chapter 3.

One last option:
ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem Design Solution:
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTit...764584642.html
Chapter 8 covers forums. The book code is written in C# but one of our readers has written a VB version that we have posted along with the C# code on our download page. You should know though, the book isn't really intended to be read 1 chapter by itself. You'd need to install the complete app, read the whole book, understand how it all works, before you could pull out and work with just the Forum chapter code.

And of course there are book forums here on p2p.wrox.com for each of these books.


Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press
Blog: http://wroxblog.typepad.com/
Jim's Book of the week: No book this week - Donate to the Red Cross!

[saif44]

Thank you very much for your support. I have ordered the book ASP.net instant solutions. Hopefully i'll find the right stuff, and finger crossed.

Thanks again.