I want to make a asp.net MVC twittercentric web app in 24 hours. I had initially thought that I’d do 24 hours in a stretch, but as an aging (31) family man I don’t think I will be able to pull that off, so its going to be stints.

So my starting point:

WHAT HAVE I GOT SO FAR?

    -I’ve decided on the platform

    -the idea and name of the app

    -written a few thoughts, notes down,

    -registered the twitter account that its going to be based around.

    -I am a proficient DOTNET developer, but a fair bit of asp.net experience, but I wouldn’t say an ASP.NET expert, and I haven’t touched ASP.NET MVC. I have however been reading about it during its development, and grok the concepts.

   - I’ve brainstormed many aspects of the features, design and architecture probably for more than a couple of hours in the background whilst doing real life.

WHAT HAVEN’T I DONE YET?

   -I don’t even have it installed in my development environment (which will be my first task).

WHAT I DON’T THINK WILL BE IN THE SCOPE OF THIS ALPHA?

   -Allowing the user to pass in their twitter credentials. I’m going to force any account related stuff to be sent via tweets from their account. I don’t want to even temporarily have twitter credentials pass through my server, until an app is fleshed out, tested, and secured.

   -Won’t be on the public internet - it will be running on localhost on my dev box.

   -Making it look pretty - I’ll just choose some basic ASP.NET MVP template to start with, and even “borrow” images from image.google.com while I flesh out the app. Of course once the first round of code is done, I’ll work on themeing it myself.

   -Won’t have any web based jobs updating my database with twitter responses. I’ll probably just have a build that part of it out in a powershell script on a recurring job for the first alpha.

   - Won’t have any ajaxy behavior. Jquery will be there, and may be used for a few visual things if it takes a short period of time, but this is pretty much just simple page requests showing data. However of course the 2nd alpha should be in more depth.

  - Will keep basic views, won’t use master pages or anything else.

WHAT I PLAY TO BE IN THE SCOPE OF THIS ALPHA.

-Allowing the user to issue commands through twitter ( with replies or direct message).

-Allowing the user to issue and record a few different types of information.

-Have a web page that displays the data related to this app, that includes graphs and charts

-Data will be retrieved by LINQ2SQL, but that LINQ2SQL will probably be simple, and for complicated queries will just call stored procedures.

-

FIRST STEPS. (some of these can be done concurrently )
-Download ASP.NET MVC and get a build in test project running.

-Choose an ASP.NET MVC template to start with

-Start the first ASP.NET MVC proof of concept. Basically get full round trip. From request->routing->controller->model (which will get data from DB) and back to view sort of thing.
-Start database and model design

-Start building powershell scripts to query twitter, and update the database.

-Fleshing out command syntax and scope limiting features.

I know I haven’t even said what this application will do, but that will come in time. I don’t plan on spamming by blog with lots of updates on this so I’ll be running a tubmlr blog for that. http://geekkarl.tumblr.com/ and will also be doing small summaries on twitter http://twitter.com/karlprosser

I’ll also be hanging out as usual in the #powershell IRC room on freenode.com and hopefully not getting too distracted there

-Karl