SubSonic: A Day In The Life Webcast Part 1 Is Ready

Thursday, May 17, 2007 -

Previously I posted a request for ideas RE a SubSonic "Green Screen" challenge, wherein y'all give me some ideas on an application I could work up and I would do a series of webcasts, showing me do just that. Lots of ideas were presented and they varied between CMS and Forums, and since our new Starter Site has a lot of CMS in it, I figured I'd go with forums.

Part 1 is ready, and it's HUGE (300M), 1 hr and 27 minutes long, and you can download it here.

It's a WMV file, as opposed to flash since many people have been complaining that FireFox crashes when they watch some of the larger flash webcasts. FireFox seems to have some memory issues is all I can say. To get around this, I made a WMV file you can watch and control in windows media.

The webcast actually covers a 4.5 hour development cycle, where I spin up (and modify) a Forums application from the ground up. You'll see me fumble my way along, talk to myself, say inappropriate things and so on (I tried to make this as real as I could, as if you were sitting next to me).

The audio is an atrocity, and you can thank Vista for that. I'm using the same microphone and audio settings, but lately Vista has an affinity for making me sound like Master Cylinder. I tried to edit it out as best I could but it still sucks - I'm sorry for that! At least if you use Windows Media you'll be able to throw down with some bass/treble tweakage.

What You'll See
As I mention I tried to break this up into "relative" chunks so that you wouldn't have to sit by while I type out code and listen to Low (The Great Destroyer is one of the best albums ever made). I try to stop at every major step and design shift, and explain why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Since this is part one, here's what you get:

• I create the DB to handle the forums, and discuss the architectural approach
• I create the initial site from the Starter Site, and break out the CMS and other things into multiple C# library projects
• I spin up the data access
• create the controller for the forums app, and show you how to make some perf compromises when dealing with ORM
• create the first UI components: Forum Group and Forum listings

The interesting thing here is the architectural decisions made - if you have ever wondered how to fit SubSonic into an "Enterprise" application, and also how to override existing load patterns, extend a class, use external DLLs - then you might want to watch this.

Where's The Code?
When I get this to a stable point, I'm going to load it to source control and whoever wants at it will get commit access. I think it would be a fun test to see what happens if I open this up completely, for all to commit to it wiki-style!

Part 2 will come along and I promise I'll keep it shorter.