Hi
It's a cold morning and time to catch up. The sun is shining, the snow has stopped and the heating has been fixed so I can stop shivering at home (any excuse to stay in the office!).
Whilst we eagerly await the release of Iron Speed V6 we have been knocking around some ideas as to the kind of application we could develop to showcase Iron Speed.
In the end we went for a job seekers site. The concept is as follows:
Light Speed Recruitment Ltd (a fictitious recruitment company) is setting up in business and wants top open a series of recruitment agencies across different cities. Each agency will be autonomous and handle their own clients and job seekers but will report to head office and will file reports to them on a monthly basis.
Each agency will allow companies to sign up for their services for which they charge an annual fee and a fee per vacancy advertised. Ads can be posted on the site by the company as and when they have a job opening.
Jobseekers will be able to sign up to the agency and register their details for which there is no charge. Job seekers will be able to browse for vacancies and apply online. They will be able to upload the CV and add the CV to their job applications.
Projects such as these require a public client facing application that the whole world can see and other more private areas where you need to register and login. In addition a very private area that only the admin can view is required. Our aim is to split the project into 2 applications, the main one being the job seeker application and the other the admin application for the owner Light Speed Recruitment Ltd who wants to configure and view the overall application, sales, payments, agencies etc. We could lump the whole thing into 1 giant application but we feel it’s easier to split the two so they can be worked on separately in parallel and keeping the size of the main application more manageable. Of course they will share the same database.
Some of the concepts we plan to incorporate into the application are:
SQL Server 2005 Database
- Good SQL Server database design for use with Iron Speed
- Best use of 1 to many, many to 1 and many to many relationship scenarios in Iron Speed
- Use of views in Iron Speed
- Tips for integrating SQL Server with Iron Speed
Iron Speed Designer
- Where to start
- Producing 80% of your application in short order
- What is takes to get the other 20% complete
- Code customisation
- Integrating with 3rd part controls
- Adding paypal payments
- Application role based security
- Splitting the project into 2 applications – the main application and the admin application
- Adding the bells and whistles
- Deployment
Those are the basics, will we now start thinking about the use cases and what each user wants from the system. As these become clear we can start designing the database and getting a feel for the project. More on that soon.
We aim to use a series of iterations to keep the project on an agile footing, we don’t want to sit down and hammer out a detailed spec for 3 months and then start developing, we want to do it bit by bit so we can change course, bring on board new ideas and include any feedback from you guys.
Software required:
Iron Speed V6 (of course…)
SQL Server 2005
Ideally Visual Studio 2008 if you are serious about code development, debugging, etc We shall be doing the code customisations in C# and will also be trying to satisfy the VB crowd and to that end will be porting where possible using readily available tools.
For our own development work we use Microsoft Team Foundation Server to handle the project management and source control aspects.
This project has to fit around our normal development work (we are a small team, 7 last count!) but we will do our best to do a little each day and keep it moving forward. Please comment on the blog as we would love your feedback.
We aim to make the project available as a series of downloads as we progress, more on that later.
That’s it for now, I’m off to mull over some design ideas and hit the whiteboard.