Hello Eric,

Thanks for the reply I have most certainly found this project a lesson in problem solving. For me it has been a slow frustratingly painful and lonely lesson. I for one have found it to be a massive learning curve; sheer determination has driven me on (plus the fact that I bought the book new and I need to publish a real asp.net site soon). I didn’t expect this to be so difficult. I expected the book to be reasonably helpful and make more of an effort to emulate the title ‘ ASP.NET Website Programming Problem – Design – Solution.’ Which was why I bought it expecting the answer. I have worked my way through various stages of VB.Net books over the last 6 months, I thought this was the next stage.

They should have realistically entitled it ‘ ASP.NET Website Programming Problem – Design – Struggle and Stumble on the Solution.’ This book is an enigma the authors have assumed far too much prior knowledge, then again such programmers have no need for the book.

I agree with you the next edition should be better. I hope the authors take heed of the forum and amend the next edition, which makes us the Guinea pig's.

I must have recreated the same few files, hundreds of times it is so frustrating especially without clear instructions and a minimum of explanation, I have felt like screaming.

How far have you got and how long has it taken you?

It has taken me weeks to recreate this application and I have only reached page 69, I am stuck again, the book mentions that they have done a couple of things to the system that might not be obvious. Make sure ThePhile file is a valid IIS. But in the downloaded code it is ThePhileVB that is the valid IIS and not ThePhile, that’s why I had so much trouble trying to get it to run in the first place as ThePhile folder does not exist and opening via ThePhile solution file causes 113 build errors.

At the moment I still have both folders, I have managed to get ThePhileVB and ThePhile solution files to reside in ThePhileVB which at the time of writing moment is my valid IIS. Now I am trying to delete ThePhile folder as per downloaded application and move the contents to reside in ThePhileVB folder.

I have got as far as 'Removing' ThePhile via IIS 'properties' which leaves ThePhileVB as the main folder. But ‘Remove’ only prevents it from being a virtual directory alongside ThePhileVB, I have not yet found a way to delete the folder and retain ThePhile folders/files I have tried dragging the contents but it causes association problems when trying to open ThePhileVB.

Hope you are having more success than me.

Ta Ta for now

Lynn

__________________
Lynn

I got both sites working: the C# and VB.NET sites. You can see my C# site here, but I don't have the new menu posted online yet (I'm getting rid of the goofy nav box and replacing it with a real menu along the left edge):
http://www.ericengler.com

I want to make a few more changes, then I'll save it off and start customizing it for my needs.

You are getting confused because the original c# project is installed in a virtual directory named "ThePhile", but the newer VB.NET project is installed in a virtual dir named "ThePhileVB". The VB book probably mentions the c# virtual directory name by accident.

On my system I have 2 directories:
C:\ThePhile
and
C:\ThePhileVB

And I made both of these into IIS virtual directories and they both work as completely separate projects - they don't share any code. But they both use the same DB because I'm lazy!

The hosted site you can see at my URL has some modifications to make it work in a virtual root directory. Instead of a virtual directory named "ThePhile", it lives in the root directory of my web site. So, my main page is http://www.ericengler.com/Default.aspx, and NOT http://www.ericengler.com/ThePhile/Default.aspx.

By the way, if you don't enjoy tearing into code so much, there's a nice freeware project for VB.NET called DotNetNuke(DNN). DNN is a world-class portal site that is easy to deploy and customize. The C# people have something similar called Rainbow. Frankly, if I had to get a site up quickly to meet a business requirement, I'd use one of these. It's going to take a longer time to get ThePhile up and running the way you want it - with your own customizations. And you also need to make some security fixes to ThePhile if you want to use it for a real business need. I've posted some info on this in other messages here.

The main reason I like ThePhile is because it's a great learning project. It's small enough that I can check out every line of code, but it's also got a large variety of controls and a business-object layer. This is kind-of like a smaller-scale version of DNN. But the real DNN is easier to customize and deploy because lots of developers have been working on it for many months.

I think ThePhile would make an interesting open source project, but I don't think there's enough interest in this.

Eric

Hello Eric

Thanks for your reply, I am impressed, not only have you created ThePhile in C and VB but also published it. You must be a seasoned programmer and must have acquired a good deal of experience and knowledge. Are you on the Wrox team? I wrongly presumed that you were also learning and working your way through this book, sorry.

Thanks for the free portal advice, I will certainly check it out.

I started to learn VB.net in order to build an ASP.Net site for myself thus understand how to customise and maintain it and not have to rely on and be at the mercy of others.

Bye for now.

Lynn

I've been a software developer for many years, but I only came to .NET about 18 months ago. I bought this book before I was ready for it, so I had to put it on the shelf for a while while I studied the more basic books.

Once I understood the foundations of .NET and the basics of ASP.NET and ADO.NET, I was able to bring my background experience to bear to help me understand this book. I learn best by jumping into something that's just a little "over my head". I enjoy the feeling of figuring out a problem that I didn't understand a day earlier.

Anwering questions in forums like this has been a big help to me. This forces me to consider problems that I haven't seen myself, and I learn by explaining things to others. It would be wrong to assume that I know it all already! This is the biggest "secret" about newsgroups and message forums: the person answering your question may not have understood the answer he's giving you until you asked the question.

Eric