You can also view part I of this article which describes the setting up of this application with Visual Studio 2008 and IIS 7, running on Vista. SQL Server 2005 was used as the database. I had originally blogged on this using VS 2005 but feedback indicated that quite a few people are now using VS 2008, so I upgraded it to VS 2008, which I am currently running on VMWare Workstation... the best $190 I ever spent. This is part II and the full code will be available for download in part III, real soon!

Speaking of feedback, I have been having problems with the comments system on this blog for some time now. So, pretty soon I am upgrading the blog engine and switching to a database version. The plan is to eventually make it a real "Community" site. Watch this space...

The Guest Book application is written in C# and is pretty straightforward. Here I will walk through the creation of the back-end which will allow the site administrator to moderate the comments posted to the guest book by site visitors.

First, we need to set up our membership system. The membership system is where most people seem to get stuck. There are several ways of achieving the same thing and I think that this is what causes much of the confusion. Typically, in an application such as this you would use a CAPTCHA control to combat the spammers, so we are not going to force users to register in order to sign the guest book. We will need an administration area for our admin forms, so we will create an "admin" role. The way I go about this is to create a new folder and call it Admin. Add a config file  to this new folder and set up the authorization rules as shown below.

Now, we're going to cheat a little. I'm going to do the TV chef and slip in a little something I pre-prepared earlier in the kitchen (actually gleaned from several of Scott Guthrie's blog postings). I always keep a sample Web.config file handy that I know is set up correctly for a basic membership system. I start this way rather than jumping in right off with the WSAT wizard because I want to have one single database for both my application and membership data. Tidier. So, I manually set up the database connection in the project Web.config file, along with entries for the membership and authentication sections. See the snippets below, and don't forget to include the roleManager tag!

Now that the membership database connection is configured the way we want it, we can run the aspnet_regsql tool from the command line. This will create the actual membership database objects for us as part of our Guests database. Just navigate from the start menu to SQL Server Management Studio and locate the command line tool under the Configuration Tools folder. Simply enter aspnet_regsql at the prompt and you will be presented with the SQL Server Setup Wizard. Here are some screenshots showing the correct selections to make:

If you go to SSMS and refresh the database, you should now be able to expand the tables icon, and you will see that the wizard had created everything we need for our membership system. At this stage, you are ready to run the WSAT tool and start setting up the admin role and adding the admin user. I will outline this process in the final installment, as well as the creation of our administration forms. Stay tuned!