Social networking has become a driving force on the Internet. Many people are part of at least one social network, while more often people are members of many different communities. For this reason many business people are trying to capitalize on this movement and are in a rush to put up their own social network. As the growth of social networks continues, we have started to see more and more niche communities popping up all over in favor of the larger, all-encompassing networks in an attempt to capture a sliver of the market.
In this book, we will discuss the many aspects and features of what makes up the majority of today's social networks or online communities. Not only will we discuss the features, their purpose, and how to go about building them, but we will also take a look at the construction of these features from a large scale enterprise perspective. The goal is to discuss the creation of a community in a scalable fashion.
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. 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. The book assumes you have prior experience of developing web applications using ASP.NET 4.0, C# , SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio .NET 2010. If you working with earlier versions of any of these, you can still go ahead and use this book as a guide to get you going. The book focuses on topics that will be of interest to existing developers and not on providing step-by-step examples for each detail.
