Many of the web applications I help build can be classified as in-production line of business applications that receive frequent and ongoing feature enhancements. Typically,
these applications have dozens if not hundreds of users who rely on the site each and every day to accomplish tasks necessary to keep the company running smoothly. Every week
or so the latest code is deployed to the production servers, bringing with it bug fixes and, very often, new features or changes to existing features. One challenge I've bumped
into when working on such applications is how to best alert users of the new features and the changes to existing features?
One useful way to announce any important, system-wide changes is to do so immediately after the user signs into the site. A very simple way to accomplish this would be to
automatically redirect all users to an announcements page after signing in, which would list information about the most recent updates to the application. However, this approach
desensitizes the user to the announcement page since they are sent there each time they sign in, regardless of whether they've already seen the announcement. A better approach
is to determine if there were any announcements made since the user last signed in. If so, redirect the user to a web page that displays just those unread announcements.
This article shows how to implement such a system using ASP.NET's Membership system, the Login control, and a dash of code. A complete working demo is available for download
at the end of this article. Read on to learn more!
Read More >