Well it had to happen, finally got a place to publicly embarrass myself (well, apart from Twitter) I had planned on contributing to SubText, but I share an office with the guy who runs it and he can get terribly bitey :-). Intention is to update little and often for a while...so don't expect quick releases!
I have put this off for a while as frankly I got burnt out on coding during my last job before Microsoft, and I don't want the stuff I put in these apps seen as any kind of 'best practice' or 'official word from MS', it's not. I will make mistakes (and for example I don't currently do TDD / even TLD (test later development)) and there WILL be some nasty stuff in these projects.
Things I plan for the forum app:
- EF based data layer...I don't know much about ORMs and this seems like a good place to start!
- Simple - want to use what's built into ASP.NET as much as possible (I tend to over-use custom server controls)
- Nested Set based hierarchy for forum->thread->message.
- Sensible DB design - want to make it pretty generic and I may go a little crazy here (e.g., self-describing objects...)
- All CSS based layout. I *hate* in-line styles and need to get my CSSback up to snuff..
- SOC - just because it's using WebForms doesn't mean it has to have a PageController architecture. Plan to use a hybrid MVC / MVP pattern on this...should give a simple layout but a lot of control.
- Lucene.NET based search infrastructure
I'll also get an ASP.NET 4.0 app up there once it gets into public hands (almost none of the new stuff was in the CTP released at PDC...will be in Beta 1).
Well, that's the plan.