While I’ve spent most of my career in the corporate world, creating applications that live behind corporate firewalls, every once in a while I’ve had the opportunity to build something accessible to the public. One of those times resulted in a website called x-voter.com.

X-Voter.com

The site itself is still available, however a WordPress blog resides there now, rather than the app I built. The purpose of X-Voter.com was to be a social site for “issue-based politics.” Here’s a snippet from the About Us page:

We decided that it would be great if we could use the internet to:

  • Decide on the issues most important to us,
  • Learn both the facts and all of the opinions on the issues,
  • Discuss our opinions with each other,
  • Come to some sort of consensus, including minority views, and
  • Get that consensus to our congressmen, senators and even the President!

The site included the following functionality:

  • User Registration
  • Subscription-based access to specific content
  • Forums
  • RSS Feeds
  • Articles
  • Voting
  • Homegrown CMS Backend

In the next post I will cover the technology behind the original X-Voter.com website.

 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am going to rewrite an ASP.NET 1.1 site that I built as a side project all the way back in 2003/2004. As discussed earlier, the first rewrite will be in ASP.NET MVC4, followed by one or more rewrites using technologies I’m not familiar with. Here’s the agenda for the next several posts:

  • A look at the ASP.NET 1.1 site I built in 2003 as a side project.
  • A rewrite of the aforementioned ASP.NET 1.1 site to ASP.NET MVC4.
    • Requirements
    • Tools And Technologies
    • Building the site.
  • Reimplement the ASP.NET MVC4 version using web frameworks and technologies I’m not familiar with, such as:

In the next post I will introduce you to my side project, X-Voter.com.

Hello and welcome to my newest website. Like my other site, this site will basically be a blog. Unlike my other site, it will focus on my professional interests, rather than personal interests.

In case you aren’t familiar with me, I am a software engineer, spending most of my time working with the Microsoft technology stack. My passion is developing for the web, though I’ve spent quite a bit of time in my career building non-web stuff.

In general, I’ll cover any aspect of technology that interests me, is relevant to my career, or I think is just too useful not to share. To kick things off, I’ve devised a little learning activity–mostly for my own benefit, but the hope is that others will find something useful as well. Here’s what you can expect to see here over the next few months:

  • An brief look at an ASP.NET 1.1 site I built in 2003 as a side project.
  • A rewrite of the aforementioned ASP.NET 1.1 site to ASP.NET MVC4.
  • Re-implement the ASP.NET MVC4 version using technologies I’m not familiar with.

I think these three topics will keep me busy for a while. I won’t commit just yet to posting on any specific interval–that will largely depend on what’s going on in the rest of my life–but I’m shooting for at least one or two posts per week.

I hope that you will join me on what should be an interesting journey.