I’m a member of a local billiards league, and while we’re pretty much all computer nerds, a few years ago I volunteered to create a website to manage our league. It’s standard stuff – allows users to log in, view their past matches, see their upcoming opponent, view the yearly schedule of matches, etc. Nothing about it is remotely complicated, but when I was writing it years ago I didn’t have much experience with ASP.NET, no experience with any type of ORM, Ajax framework, or pretty much anything else that constitutes today’s modern web applications. I also had to complete it in a hurry because I started roughly a month before our next league season started. Anyway, all of that is to say that the current website for our pool league is in dire need of a rewrite.

So, I’m in the process of creating an entirely new website for our league. The new website will be based on ASP.NET MVC, using S#arpArchitecture in particular. I’ll also borrow ideas from the excellent Who Can Help Me? showcase application for SharpArch. SharpArch itself is overkill for this small application, but I want to use this as a learning experience so I’m ok with dealing with the extra overhead. WCHM is even more advanced/complicated, so I’m only going to pluck a few interesting ideas from there (LinqRepository, for one).

I’m hosting the source for this new app at http://code.google.com/p/clubpool/, so it’s open source by default (not that anyone else would want this code, but they provide a free SVN server, so what the heck). I’m also using this experience as an excuse to start blogging, so I’m going to blog about it along the way. What I write will definitely NOT be a tutorial, since I’m learning along the way myself, but I’ll write about my decision making, interesting discoveries in ASP.NET MVC, SharpArch, etc. My hope is that someone out there will read these posts and offer their own insight and tell me where I’m going wrong. By blogging, I’m hoping to expose myself and this application to developers that are better than I am, so that they can help me. I’m certainly not doing it to instruct anyone else on how to write an application!

So that’s ClubPool. A relatively simple web app for managing my local billiards league, making use of these components:

• ASP.NET MVC
• S#arpArchitecture
• Elmah error logging
• NHibernate, including NHibernate.Linq
• jQuery
• Some ideas from the Who Can Help Me? SharpArch showcase app

Hopefully I’ll learn something along the way.

asp.net · ASP.NET MVC · ClubPool · SharpArchitecture