Social Networking is all about developing connections or ties between friends and associates. While people have always networked with one another the Internet has allowed us to network with people all over the world easily. Any interest or cause can support its own social network, where fans and followers can meet, chat, and share their views. But building a social networking site from scratch involves some complex logic, and some serious coding.

This book shows how to build a scalable, enterprise-ready social network using ASP.NET. The book uses the latest features of ASP.NET to provide a platform that is efficient, easy to maintain, and extensible. Whether you want to build your own social network, are developing a social site for a customer or employer, or just want a practical guide to developing complex ASP.NET applications then this book is ideal for you.

The book starts by planning the essential features of our social network, and then building a 'community framework' that will give our site a solid foundation and enable us to add all our social networking features. We then go on to create user accounts, profile pages, messaging systems, 'friend' relationships between members, media galleries, blogs, message boards, groups, and more. Along the way you will see LINQ, MVC, AJAX, and other features of ASP.NET 3.5 put to practical and interesting uses.

What you will learn from this book?

* Make key decisions about architecture and the tools to use
* Build a solid 'community framework' to give your site a strong foundation; the principles explored this framework will apply to any large-scale web application
* Create user accounts, set up a permissions system, and handle password encryption
* Work with user profiles, and establish 'friend' relationships between different users
* Let users customize their profile and communicate with one another
* Understand core concepts of LINQ to SQL and work with it in a layered environment
* Moderate the site, ensuring safety, dealing with cross-site scripting (XSS), privacy, and decency
* Utilize the Model View Presenter pattern with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable Test Driven Development
* Add an internal search engine using SQL Server and Lucene.NET
* Work with appropriate design patters to create a scalable long-lasting enterprise framework

Approach

Each chapter starts by showing the user experience we are going to create in the chapter. It then has a section discussing the major design decisions we face in building these features, and finally presents the 'solution' - including the overall architecture and highlighting the most important code elements.

The book presents a lot of real-world code, with comprehensive explanation and discussion. The full social network application is available for download from the Packt website, for you to examine, study, and modify.

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for ASP.NET and C# developers who want to build an enterprise-grade Social Network, either for their own business purposes or as a contract job for another company.