Introducing Parastream PagePorter

Parastream™ PagePorter™ is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that bridges the gap between Microsoft FrontPage and Visual Studio .NET. With PagePorter, you can design full-featured web sites with the .NET framework armed with an array of powerful new site management tools and web controls.

PagePorter Highlights

This section contains information about some of the latest features available in this release of PagePorter.

Enhanced Page Class

The PagePorter Class Library includes an enhanced web forms page class Parastream.Web.UI.FpPage derived from System.Web.UI.Page. It adds these new capabilities to web forms:

Common shared borders that are automatically inserted into the web pages. These borders can be created automatically from an existing FrontPage web's shared borders.
Control over page formatting including the space between borders and the main page content, setting a page width and alignment within the browser window.
Can handle automatic redirects to secure or insecure domains with optional host name and port number overrides to better handle secure sites. For example if your site has a secure server certificate for www.parastream.com, you should redirect requests from http://parastream.com to https://www.parastream.com as opposed to https://parastream.com.
A System.Collections.Hashtable object that provides a general purpose data store for more complex web controls.

PagePorter will automatically use this page base class for all new web forms pages created in PagePorter projects.

Site-Based Hyperlink Management

PagePorter maintains a comprehensive database of hyperlinks in the project, which may be used to:

Keep hyperlinks updated throughout the project if the name of a file is changed. The most common reason for this is when a FrontPage web page is converted to a web forms page and the extension changes from .htm to .aspx, or possibly an entire name change such as index.htm to default.aspx.
View a simple interactive report of all hyperlinks in the project.

Site Navigation

PagePorter maintains a hierarchal site navigation structure that is used by the FpLinkBar web control and visually edited with Navigation View. The navigation structure's database is fully compatible and interchangeable with the database used by FrontPage.

The FpLinkBar web control provides all of the functionality of the FrontPage Navigation Bar control, including graphical buttons.

Navigation View represents the navigation structure in a tree view, and supports drag and drop editing, custom link bars.

Site Variables

PagePorter maintains a collection of site variables that may be used by the Substitution control. This feature allows the web site designer to use site-wide constants symbolically in web forms. For example, you can define a variable named SupportPhone to hold the telephone number for technical support; if it changes in the future, the new number is instantly reflected in the web site. The web site variable database is fully compatible and interchangeable with the database used by FrontPage.

FrontPage Web Page Converter

PagePorter can convert FrontPage web pages directly into ASP.NET web forms, automatically converting the FrontPage controls (sometimes called WebBots) into the corresponding web forms controls. See Supported FrontPage Features for more information.

Project Co-management with FrontPage

PagePorter projects may be created from a simple template and expanded from there, or may be created with an associated FrontPage web. In the latter case, the project may be set up to support management from Visual Studio .NET and FrontPage. This configuration lets you use the best tool for the job – FrontPage for HTML design, and Visual Studio .NET for coding. See Using PagePorter with FrontPage for more information.

Support for FrontPage Themes

PagePorter web forms pages support methods for reading information from FrontPage themes. You must import themes from FrontPage; PagePorter does not have the ability to create or edit them.

Improved Design-time Experience

PagePorter web forms pages and controls have the ability to access site-wide information at design-time, giving controls such as FpLinkBar and FpSubstitution the ability to render in the forms designer. This feature is lacking in Visual Studio .NET.