With any framework, technology, tutorial, book, idea, <insert pedagogical sources here>, it's often difficult to figure how the technique should be used in the real world. Sure, things sound great when the scope of your project deals cleanly with Customers, Orders and Order Items; and sure, auto-binding works great in a nicely controlled scenarios...but how should things work in the "real world." No, not the Real World in which Brooke has a complete meltdown in season 18. I'm talking about the real world in which many scenarios aren't clean cut in determining where the controller should end and the application services layer should take over; the world in which you're trying to bind from unique data collection mechanisms to appease odd requests from the client; the world in which even the GoF would retort with "heh, that's a tricky one." Yes, we're faced with these kinds of dilemmas on a frequent basis. What I find to be truly helpful is to look at full blown, real-world applications. While a real-world application is never perfect, you can often find great gems for dealing with tricky situations and using patterns and complex scenarios. Howard van Rooijen has released just such a real-world application demonstrating the use of S#arp Architecture, AutoMapper, ELMAH, Spark View Engine, and other great tools.
In Howard's own words... "A few months ago I wrote an email to the community about a site we had just launched – http://fancydressoutfitters.co.uk that used S#arp Architecture at its core along with a whole myriad of other Open Source Frameworks and Tools (Spark, AutoMapper, PostSharp, xVal...).
In the run up to the festive period, myself and two of the development team – Jonathan George & James Broome, decided that in the spirit of giving, we wanted to gift something back to the communities that gave so much to us throughout the year; so we decided to build a new sample web application to showcase the use of these various frameworks & tools called “Who Can Help Me?” which is based on the same architectural style as http://fancydressoutfitters.co.uk.
Who Can Help Me? started out as a small web application I built a few years ago to solve a small and specific business problem within our consulting organisation (and to test out .NET 3.5, LINQ to SQL, ASP.NET WebForms & MS AJAX!). The problem was, that as the organisation grew and new members of staff started, they found it difficult to find the right people who could help them solve specific problems they’d encounter in their consulting gigs. As I have worked for the organisation for a long time (>9 years) I generally knew everyone, had worked with most of them and knew what their areas of expertise were, thus I’d get a few calls every day asking “Do you know anyone who knows about X that could help me?”. The solution was to create a searchable skills matrix that would allow people within an organisation find other people who had specific skills or expertise who could help them solve a particular problem.
So Jonathan, James & I decided to re-write the Who Can Help Me? from scratch, using the architecture style, frameworks and tools we used to build http://fancydressoutfitters.co.uk - it might seem like we've massively over-complicated the architecture for such a simple application - but we really wanted this to demonstrate some of the concepts & techniques we used to build a full scale, public facing enterprise web application.
Who Can Help Me? utilises the following:
The project is currently hosted at Codeplex: http://whocanhelpme.codeplex.com/ and we’ve also released a live demo: http://who-can-help.me. We’ve added some documentation on the Codeplex homepage and will continue to refine this and augment it with blog posts covering some topics in more depth – so if you’re interested – please keep an eye on the following blogs / twitter:
Thanks very much for this contribution Howard! Besides myself, I'm sure others have found this project helpful and will continue to do so in the future.
Enjoy!
Billy McCafferty
Posted
02-03-2010 2:04 PM
by
Billy McCafferty