Programming C#, Third Edition

Chapter 16. Putting It All Together

In this chapter, you will use many of the skills acquired so far to build a set of integrated applications. The goal of these applications is to track the relative Amazon.com sales standings of my books on C#, ASP.NET, and VB.NET (and to make the architecture extensible so that as new books arrive, you can add them at will).

When the work is done, you will be able to display the results in a web application, not unlike the one shown in Figure 16-1. To see how various technologies work, you’ll build this first as a “screen-scraper” application, and then again as a Web Services client.

Figure 16-1.  Displaying the rankings

The Overall Design

You will actually build two independent applications (a desktop application and an ASP.NET application) tied together by a back-end database. Specifically, you’ll create a desktop application that obtains data from Amazon.com and stores it in a table in a SQL Server database, and then you’ll display that data in your ASP.NET application.^[11]

The SQL Server Database is very simple. It is named AmazonSalesRanks and consists of a single table, BookInfo, as shown in Figure 16-2.

Figure 16-2.  The BookInfo table

Tip

All of the fields in this table are allowed to be null because we cannot control what information may or ...