As you have seen from my previous posts, I was involved in a charity event with Microsoft over the weekend.

The quick recap:

Our charity, Volunteer Center of North Texas, needed a web front end to a SQL database that they have been keeping up since they started. Currently it's a set of Access DB screens on top of the data. Yuck!

I am proud of what we accomplished, though it's nowhere near being completely finished, I feel as if they have a better start to their technological needs. To help them finish, another non-profit company has graciously donated consulting time to each of the projects for wrap-up and setup. Their sole purpose is to help 501c3 with the often expensive tasks of IT stuff. Wish I could remember their name...

At any rate, here's a quick breakdown of what we accomplished:

The site is built using ASP.Net 2.0 and SQL Server functionality. No other third part components are required.

The back end is driven by a powerful, unit tested DataMapper pattern implementation, more documentation here http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/dataMapper.html, which provides developers with a nice object model to work with and abstracts (or hides) the database entirely.

The front end is powered on ASP.Net 2.0 and features search functionality that is more efficient and easier than what was provided in their Access database GUI.

High-lights:

• Meeting more developers in the area.
• Being able to help charities (duh!).
• Learning more about ASP.Net from other developers.
• We crammed a lot into the last half of the weekend...

Low-lights:

• We had a rough start.
• I worked from home, that provided some pitfalls, but overall the communication was always open.
• The first half of the weekend was focused slightly on feature sets and defining things, instead of digging into the core code right away.
• It felt a little disorganized, but that's because I was remote and we couldn't quite grasp our team feel until Saturday evening.

Overall, the weekend was a huge success... and I'm sure lots of people got the help that they needed!