I’ve recently decided that I needed to make quite a number of updates to my web site. The site was extremely stale, had a boring template, and there was no “live” aspect to it. My blog (this one) was hosted on a separate sub domain, and didn’t really have any integration into the site. I also have a site with a few code samples (more to come) primarily for proof of concept.
So three sites, each with a different purpose, and no real integration between them other than the occasional hyperlink. And each of the three sites have a totally different look and feel to them, so there’s no good way to just intrinsically feel like they’re connected.
For a couple of work projects, I’ve been making use of the ASP.Net MVC framework, and have really come to like it—far more so than my previous WebForms work. That’s not to say that WebForms is bad technology, I truly feel that it has its place, but that place, for me, is not where I want to focus my efforts.
I started with a commercial HTML theme I purchased for my site. (I’ve previously used some free templates, and have just never been completely happy with them—it’s as if the designers were more amateur than those publishing templates for sale.) I adapted the template to fit my MVC project, put in some basic content, and deployed it; there’s no “real” MVC code going on at all in the app yet, just some views with static content, some error pages, and a small bit of blog integration.
Plans
I have some plans for the site that I hope to get to soon. I’ve been using the excellent BlogEngine.Net application to host this blog, but am really thinking of doing a blog app of my own. It’s been said lately that blog software is becoming the “hello world” of web development, but I think it could be an interesting experience anyway.
I have a dead implementation of the Slide.Show Silverlight sample application that I’d like to dump and turn into something much more usable for personal photos/content, etc.
I’d like to be able to have the small code samples available for download as well as a living part of the site.
My goals are to take many of the patterns and practices I’ve been learning and currently applying and try to apply them in a possibly better manner here.
In my work projects, I’ve been utilizing NHibernate for an O/RM, Microsoft’s Unity container for Dependency Injection. Due to my general nature, I’d really like to take a look at Linq to SQL or Entity Framework, along with a different IoC container (maybe StructureMap or Ninject). It’s not that I disapprove of the existing tools I’ve been working with—just that I find it educational to see where other approaches can take me.
I think it’ll be a fun experience. I’m going to try to occasionally document what I’m up to—and hopefully I’ll get this blog and its existing content migrated to my new platform.