Yes, I know, it was 20 days ago that I said I would have published the link to the sample site developed for my "ASP.NET Website Programming - Problem Design Solution" book in a couple of days...but you know, there was Christmas, the New Year's Eve etc. etc. Anyway, here it comes: http://www.dotnet2themax.com/TheBeerHouse/

The following list outlines the current features, chapter by chapter:

1. Chapter 1: Introduction
2. Chapter 2: Design and implementation of the site's master page, multiple themes switchable by the user at runtime (see the Themes drop-down list at the top-right corner of any page), sitemap & menu system.
3. Chapter 3: Discussions about a lot of stuff that goes under the name of "Site Foundations", such as choosing the data store, designing a configurable DAL based on the Provider Model design patter, using System.Transactions or Serverices Without Components for managing distributed transactions, caching strategies, health monitoring & exception handling, and more. Implementation of a number of base helper classes, and configuration classes to map custom sections in web.config.
4. Chapter 4: Design and implementation of a full-featured membership and profiling system, and role-based security. A complete administration console is also built to allow administrators to see and modify the profile of any user, including blocking or deleting it, adding or removing roles to it, and more.
5. Chapter 5: Design and implementation of a feature-rich module for publishing articles and dynamic content. It's like a mini-CMS, that allows you define categories and articles with support of rich formatting (through a WYSIWYG editor), generates site-wide RSS feeds or feeds for individual categories (a generic RSS reader is also provided), allows users to browse through paginated articles, post comments and rate the article. A complete administration console was built to completely manage the content from the browser, including moderating comments, protecting articles against anonymous users, setting the article's visibility date range and much more.
6. Chapter 6: Design and implementation of a module for creating and managing opinion polls. There's the ability to create multiple polls and setting one as the current one displayed on the site's common layout, archiving past polls and deciding whether the archive is accessible to anonymous users or not, choosing whether the system checks for multiple votes by the user user by using cookies and/or IP, and more.
7. Chapter 7: Design and implementation of a module for sending out newsletters and managing the archive, which can be public or not. The great thing here is that the module uses a multi-threaded procedure to send newsletters, and takes advantage of AJAX technology to provide real-time feedback of the completion status without refreshing the whole page.
8. Chapter 8: Design and implementation of a forums system with support for multiple sub-forums that can optionally be moderated (by users with a tailor-made role), paginated thread list with different sorting options (by date, number of replies, number of views), configurable poster level, support for avatars, signatures and much more.
9. Chapter 9: Design and implementation of an e-commerce store. TODO!!!
10. Chapter 10: Integration of the Web Part Framework into the site, so that authenticated users can personalize the homepage (and a few more pages) by dynamically adding, removing, editing and moving around content boxes such a poll box, the feed of latest articles, latest forum discussions, most active threads, external RSS feeds, and more. Editors and administrators can edit a shared view, to change what the homepage contains - and how it displays the content - without actuallyediting the physical .aspx file and re-uploading it.
11. Chapter 11: Complete localization of the site's common layout, the homepage, and the Web Part controls that can be placed on the personalizable pages. The supported languages are English and Italian, and the user can choose her language at registration time, or later from the Edit Profile page.
12. Chapter 12: full pre-compilation of the site, and deployment on the remote server, with a SQL Server 2005 DB (instead of the Express DB using during development). An installer for distributable packages was also created.

As you see, the only thing left is just the e-commerce part, which I'll be developing in the next days. When complete, I think this will be one of the most complete ASP.NET 2.0 sites around, with really a lot of features and details that you don't usually find in "sample projects". Actually, I stopped calling this just a sample quite some time ago, as I consider it a real-world site. Implementing all this stuff gave me the opportunity to describe all new controls and features of ASP.NET 2.0 within a real context, and I believe this is more useful than simple one-page examples that show new features one-by-one without integrating them into a larger project.

If you're interested in the book and the site developed, please give a look at the site online and have a tour of it...and if you have any feedback please don't be shy, your comments will be seriouly considered!