Facebook Style website ideas

[Nitesh]

Hi Guys,

I need to develop an app similar to facebook using asp.net. I need to have a wall as well as comments page, and the ability to invite friends. I have created the database but I am seriously stuck on the UI side. I did some research on how facebook loads their pages. Apparently they use something called BigPipe to load parts of the page at a time. What would be the best way to do that using asp.net? I would appreciate some ideas on implementing a wall etc. Thanks

[Fishcake]

It's hard to give you an answer on this. Have you tried something but gotten stuck?

From what I know of BigPipe it was created by Facebook software developers to speed up load time of Facebook.

Although they give a rough outline of what they did in the above link I really don't think replicating BigPipe is going to be necessary until you have millions of users using your site.

What part of 'the wall' are you struggling with? Is it how to load updates dynamically? or how to selectively display Important posts?

[gep13]

Hello,

How about something like this to get started with:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Socia...r-Kit-9fe473cf

Gary

[Nitesh]

hi guys,

Thanks. I'm trying to implement wall posts functionality. I have an account table(AccountID, Firstname, Surname etc)

I have a Wall_Post table (WallPostID, WallPost, PostTime, Vote_Up, Vote_Down, AccountID) AccountID = id of person who posted.

I have a Wall_Comments table which allows friends to reply to wall posts.

WallCommentID, WallComment, PostTime, WallPostID (Foreign key), AccountID (id of person who wrote comment).

I'm working on a page called wall.aspx. However I dynamically create the ordered list and the div's that display the wall post and comments etc in the code behind. I don't really like my setup so far.

I have a repeater that displays WallPosts and on its ItemDataBound event I check for the number off comments for that post etc. If it is more than two I display a link that says "View all 10 comments". below that I display the first two comments.

Clicking on the link does an ajax call to a webmethod which goes and gets all 10 comments and replaces the contents of the necessary divs using jquery.

this all works but I feel it is a bit dirty. Should I do the database queries etc in the markup? if so, how? I don't like dynamically creating controls. adding them to the correct container can get confusing. I'd like to do it without a repeater as well but I only know how to bind to those controls. Please can someone show me how I would do this without a repeater.

[gep13]

Hey,

If you are going to stick to using "raw" ASP.Net, then the Repeater control is probably one of the most useful and flexible controls, so I would certainly recommend sticking with that one.

You are not really doing the database query in the markup, you are using a jQuery method on the client to make a call back to the database server, so as long as you have sensible BLL and DAL structure there, I don't see a problem with this.

As for adding the controls dynamically to the page, yes, this is going to be troublesome, but it is also the approach that gives the best user experience.

Gary

[Nitesh]

thanks gary. I always follow your wise advice so I will stick with the current setup