Introduction
Hello, and welcome to my MSDN blog. I blog in a ton of other places, but I set this blog up specifically to share my experiences building an application from scratch. What might also be interesting is that I am, at best, a hobby programmer and I have never written a full application on the Microsoft platform before.
The task: build a web-based, club management application for my running club, the Singapore Hash House Harriets. I am the volunteer webmaster for the site which I maintain using Expression Web 3.
Why? Because club management, scheduling of runs, and communication are all very manual right now, paper based, and subject to error, confusion, and hurt feelings.
The Platform Chosen: ASP.NET 3.5, MVC2, SQL Server 2005, LINQ to SQL. The tool of choice is Visual Studio 2010.
Why? Well, a number of both “business reasons” and my own preferences:
- We selected GoDaddy as our web hosting platform this year and 3.5 and SQL 2005 is all they offer.
- I want to learn the Microsoft platform better.
- I liked the look of MVC2 and wanted to see how “easy” or “hard” it was for an amateur to program in it.
- NerdDinner had a lot of the characteristics I needed at first glance and NerdDinner was written in MVC2 with .NET 4.0. I took a risk that I would be able to get the function to work on 3.5 and so far, that risk has worked out.
This blog will look a little backwards in time because started work about one month ago and I already have some core function written and am getting close to deploying a UAT version. So I need to share some of the experiences I had and mistakes I made along the way.
Comments are very welcome, particularly suggestions for improvements to my approach and better ways of doing things.