PagePorter

2002-2004 — Parastream Technologies, Inc.

Introduction

Parastream PagePorter adds web site management capabilities to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. It is compatible with Microsoft FrontPage, so you can continue to develop your site in FrontPage and Visual Studio .NET, or you can use PagePorter's convert command to convert some or all of your web pages to ASP.NET pages. PagePorter defines a new Visual Studio .NET "PagePorter Web Site" project type that can create a standalone project, or one that is associated with a FrontPage web.

The site management capability of PagePorter consists of a Navigation View window that is compatible with the FrontPage navigation structure, and a site hyperlink manager. To enable conversion of FrontPage web pages to ASP.NET, PagePorter comes with a suite of controls that provide the functionality of the FrontPage controls (formerly called "webbots"). Since the "look and feel" of the PagePorter components is the same as FrontPage components, your site visitors will not see any difference between your old FrontPage site and your new .NET site (except for the new features you can now add to your site in .NET!).

Works with either C#, Visual J#, or Visual Basic .NET languages.
Shares the FrontPage web settings (Parameters, Navigation, etc) with the Visual Studio .NET project.
Can keep the Visual Studio .NET project "in sync" with the FrontPage project.
All .NET pages inherit the shared borders and other functionality from a base class that you control.
All of the custom controls come with full documentation to support writing your own code.
The Search control supports more advanced indexing and searching features than the FrontPage control.

Development

I handled the entire project, including concept, design, implementation, testing, documentation, packaging, and marketing. The product is written in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2002 mostly in C# and C++. The documentation is composed in Microsoft FrontPage 2003, and compiled into a .chm file using Microsoft HTML Help Workshop. The class library documentation is generated by Ndoc using the C# source code comments. The web site pages at http://www.parastream.com/software/pageporter are composed in Microsoft FrontPage 2003. The source control used was Perforce.

Technologies

PagePorter is an add-in and a suite of custom controls. Numerous workarounds in the add-in were necessary due to bugs and incorrect/misleading documentation about the IDE. The custom controls were fairly straightforward, once the FrontPage behavior was documented.

Visual Studio .NET
- Add-In
- Custom tool window and shim
- Help integration
- Event handlers
- Property Extenders
- Custom Setup Actions
ASP.NET Custom Controls
- Caching
- Designers
- Property Extenders
FrontPage
- Operational Compatibility
- Reverse-engineering controls and file formats

Conclusion

The product contains over 35,000 lines of C# code and 59 help topics.

You can click on the image in the upper-right corner to see a larger image, and you can download a demo copy at http://www.parastream.com/software/pageporter.

Because the product is currently in production, the source code and other technical information are available only by request under Parastream Technologies' NDA. Contact Parastream Technologies, Inc. for more information.

(All links to company web sites used by permission)