YaBlogEngine - A Tiny Blog Engine written in ASP.NET/C#

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Introduction

This article presents a very small scale blog engine using ASP.NET and SQLServer. The idea here is to understand how a rudimentary blog engine can be implemented with proper architecture.

Background

I have been a C++ programmer for 5 years writing core applications mainly dealing with graphics, multimedia and networking domain. After that, I started writing Windows applications using C# and WPF. Recently, I started writing websites using ASP.NET/C#/SqlServer. On this recent project, I got a chance to learn a lot about web development. Here I am taking care of one particular service starting from its Data layer to its presentation layer. Although the architecture here is not following a strict n-tier approach, that didn't stop me from learning and implementing the n-tier architecture for web applications. When my wife asked me about how things work in ASP.NET (she is more of a web designer than a developer), I created this small blog engine to explain to her the basics of ASP.NET websites and n-tier architecture.

Using the Code

We have tried to follow a proper n-tier architecture. The bottom most layer is the Data layer which contains the tables and stored procedures of SqlServer. On top of that, we have a Data Access Layer (DAL). This Data access layer is created as a separate solution so that the changes in DAL only need the recompilation of DAL and not the complete website. Also the changes in other areas outside this solution will not demand for DAL recompilation. On top of DAL, we have our Business Logic Layer(BLL). It is also in a separate solution for the same reason, and the Presentation layer is a website containing ASP.NET pages running on top of BLL.

The Data Layer

The first thing we need to do is to plan out the database schema that we will be using. Here is the snapshot of the database schema that I created.

Along with the schema, I also created few stored procedures for common operations on database. I like the idea of having stored procedures for all database operations as it is the most secure way of accessing the database (from the perspective of SQL injection). If you ask me, the best way to implement the DB operations is:

1. Stored procedures
2. Executing Parametrizec commands
3. Dynamically creating queries by string concatenation (only when I absolutely have to because this is the worst way so I usually avoid it)

So the stored procedures that we have in this application are:

The Data Access Layer(DAL)

The data access layer talks to the database, retrieves the results and passes it to the business logic layer in the form of DataSets or DataTables. The DAL contains the following classes:

The respective classes in this DAL are responsible for talking to the respective database tables. The common functions are moved inside the class Functions.

The Business Logic Layer(BLL)

The BLL takes care of manipulating the data as per the request from the user interface, have some additional checks and operations that need to be performed. The main classes in our BLL are:

The Presentation Layer

The presentation layer contains the web forms that the user can access. The presentation layer is divided in two areas, one for the normal users to browse through the blog entries and the other for the administrator to add/change blog entries, categories and/or metadata. (Please see the source for detailed implementation.) I have not used the forms authentication or Windows authentication for this small website rather I am keeping track of users in my databases and authenticating and authorizing then programmatically. This was a design decision I made (perhaps not a good one) but more elegant solutions can be implemented too (since the main idea here was learning data access in n-tier apps, so I didn't).

The website runs in two modes:

• User mode - Simply run the website after compiling the BLL and DLL
• Admin mode - Run the website. Add /admin in the URL to go to the Admin mode (USERNAME: admin, password: 12345)

Points of Interest

The idea behind this exercise was to understand and implement n-tier data access architecture for beginners. But I am ready to take suggestions and add improvements so that this engine can further be improved.

History

• 9 Feb 2012: YaBlogEngine's Version 1 implemented