Download Dundas Data Visualization.  Choose the Enterprise edition.  I’ve used DevExpress, Telerik and Infragistics charting and I’ve come to like this one the best.  The technical support is top notch (even for trial users), the charts are easy to use and the product is fully operational (it applies a watermark to the chart until you buy a license), the trial never runs out and the documentation is excellent.  All of these are very important, to me anyway.

Download Micrsoft Enterprise Library Version 4.1, October 2008.  Just for fun I used this for business and error logging in the application.

Create a directory on the drive of your choice named Samples.  Create another subdirectory on your C drive named Logs.

Extract the IMA.zip file into the Samples subdirectory.  You should see the following two files and one directory: IMAData.bak, IMASecurity.bak and IMA (directory)

Restore the two bak files to an SQL Server of your choice.

Launch Visual Studio 2008 and open the solution file <drive>:\Samples\IMA\IMA.sln

Edit the Global.asax file in the IMAWeb project and change the Data Source property from localhost to the name of of the server to which you restored the backups.  This connection uses Windows Authentication so make sure the user name under which you signed in has permissions to use this database.

Set the IMA project to Set as Startup Project (right click the Project name and select Set as Startup Project).

Build the solution, you should get one error in the license.licx file.  Open that file by double-clicking the error in the Errors tab and delete the line that references DevExpress.  Save and close and rebuild.  Now you should have no errors.

Launch the application and work through the connection configuration that is standard with a WinForms application built using StrataFrame.  Make sure you use Windows Authentication for both the Data and the Security database connections.

Set the IMAWeb application as the Set as StartUp Project.

Run the application … the login in TLT with the password being “easy#777”
This application is fully integrated with security, it uses transactions between two tables, Contact and Customer.  It uses Dundas Charts to show the number of users per day created.  The only thing I left out was reporting.  It is embarrassing but after using StrataFrame for almost four years I’ve only written one report.  I would appreciate it if a reporting expert would take this application and add a reporting module to it, Greg McGuffey <s> and roll your “Reporting: Create a typed dataset from Business Objects that can be bound at design time to reports”. Or, feel free, Mr. Mauri, to lend your expertise in reporting using Report Sharp-Shooter as well.

Please feel free to play around with the security editor and then launch the web application again and see how the different settings affect the functionality of the application.

Also check out how easy it is to use the Microsoft Enterprise Library for logging purposes.

I tried to roll as much as I could about my knowledge of web development into this sample application, however, I am by no means the be all and end all of StrataFrame web development.  If you know how to do something better, improve it and repost that application, please share with others.  That is how we all learn.