Web Forms UI

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the creation of a basic Web Forms UI based on the business objects from Chapter 8. As with the Windows Forms technology in Chapter 9, there are many ways to create a Web Forms interface, and the one I’ve created here is just one option among many.

The key is that the business objects automatically enforce all business rules and provide business processing so that the UI doesn’t need to include any of that code. As you can see, it is very possible to create two very different user interfaces based on exactly the same set of business objects, data access code, and database design.

As shown here, the website is configured for optimal performance, running the Session and the data portal in the same process as the web forms. You could increase scalability and fault tolerance by moving Session into its own process, or onto a state server. You could potentially increase security by running the data portal server components on a separate application server. In either case, all you need to do is change some settings in Web.config; the UI code and business objects will work in all these scenarios.

In Chapter 11, I’ll show how you can create another type of interface to the business objects by using Web Services. Then Chapter 12 will show how to create remote data portal hosts for remoting, Enterprise Services, and Web Services.