Introducing Able Probe, Inc, SUFORS & The Team

Work on the Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop is coming along nicely. We announced the workshop on May 5th and have 20 people signed up already. If you are interested in attending, secure your seat ASAP. Only 15 seats left.

So what progress has been made on the materials? The amazing Trevor has been working hard on our customer personae. Not only has he created a great set of user stories, for our fake customer but he has also gone off and created a whole online presence as well. If you are planning to attend, be sure to get familiar with our customer, the more we understand their business the better crafted our solution will be.

Our workshop is focused on taking an existing application and applying principals and techniques of quality software development to make the application more maintainable and easier to add new functionality to.

This requires that we have an existing application. So this last weekend I began working on version 1 of SUFORS, the State UFO Reporting System. Version 1 of SUFORS is intended to be built using the MSDN recommended style of development. So I have attempted to lean on Visual Studio to do most of the heavy lifting for me.

For example, lets examine the Citizen Detail page. In this page I have used the Visual Studio designer to create and configure three SqlDataSources that feed data to a GridView, DataList and DetailsView. The SqlDataSources use a set of CRUD stored procedures to interact with the database. Combined this gives us a nicely crafted page consisting of the Citizen's personal information, a list of any internal "Concern" flags and a tabular view of all the Reports submitted by that Citizen.

The page also has some preconfigured actions. The table of reports obviously links off to a Report Detail page. The menu content area is populated with options to Edit the current Citizen, Add a new Report or simply Cancel out of this page and return form where ever you came from.

So as you can see SUFORS is not your average, sample application. It will be fully functional. It would be awesome of all the attendees would download the current version and become familiar with it. Also keep your eyes on the source control repository for updates as we add new features over the next couple weeks.

The other members of the team (Chris, Justin, Jeff, Robin, Anne & Shanah) are planning to meet at this weekends ALT.NET Seattle meeting to work out some more details. I'll post again afterwards to keep you up to date on any new material or changes.

Looking forward to seeing you all there and having a great time at the workshop.