Time Tracker Sample Application

Time Tracker is a Microsoft ASP .NET 2.0 sample application. Traditionally, this application has been used as a sample for demonstrating an application that is built with and runs in an ASP .NET 2.0 environment as a sample source; object code is provided in the download.

As part of Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting for Applications version 1.5 , the Time Tracker sample application has been modified significantly to demonstrate how a traditional, single tenant application can evolve into a multi-tenant application that provides a delegated administration interface. Specifically, the application has been modified to work with the architecture and components provided with Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting for Applications version 1.5 .

The ASP.NET 2.0 Time Tracker Starter Kit is extended in order to guide an ISV through the process of developing, deploying, and managing an application in the Web-based hosted environment.

The Time Tracker sample application is meant to provide you with sample code that you can use to learn and understand how to apply application hosting techniques using the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting for Applications version 1.5 . This document is meant to help guide you through the process of developing, deploying, and managing an application in the Web-based hosted environment.

The content of this section provides pragmatic solutions for the guidance provided in the Application Hosting section of the documentation. In addition, the Time Tracker sample application includes all installation files necessary for setting up the application in a hosted environment, manual procedures for deploying the application, a sample control panel, and all of the source code for the application and its hosting components.

Specifically, this section covers the following application hosting considerations:

Specific information for each of these feature is provided in later topics.

Time Tracker Design Assumptions

There are many design considerations an ISV must take into account when developing a hosted offering. It is impossible to address all possible designs that an ISV could implement. With this in mind, the Time Tracker sample application has been designed to be as simple as possible while still touching on many of the issues that would be relevant to an ISV. In keeping with this principle the following design decisions have been made:

•	The application isolates users from different customer organizations by running instances of the application in separate Application Pools in Internet Information Services (IIS). There is one Application Pool per customer organization, and a Web server can run several instances of the Time Tracker application at one time. It is also very easy to place different instances of the application on different Web servers.   Note It is not possible to partition the application so that a single instance runs across multiple servers.
•	Individual users’ access to the application and the database is based on Windows group policy, which is maintained using Active Directory. One database is assigned to each organization or instance of Time Tracker. User access to the database tables within an organization's database is granted based on the user's Windows Group membership. Time Tracker does allow you to create multiple databases on a single database server, and it is easy to place the database for each customer on different SQL servers. However, there is no attempt to partition the Time Tracker database so that a single customer’s data is split across multiple servers.
•	New users are added to the system by an organization's Admin using the control panel. This task can also be done by placing the users directly into the correct groups in Active Directory and bypassing the control panel.
•	Before adding instances of the Time Tracker application or users, it is assumed that the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting for Applications version 1.5 structure has already been created in Active Directory.

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