Ascendance Website - Solution Architect, Developer, Webmaster
February 2005 - Present
Designed, developed, and currently maintain a community website for a popular online based game.
Technologies: Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft Ajax Extensions 1.0, Lua.NET
This artifact is the AscendanceWoW.com website. Ascendance is a community website for a World of Warcraft guild consisting of 40-60 members. The website handles tracking of events, players, items, and points gained from attending events. The site received upwards of 45,000 unique visitors in 2006.
I have included this artifact because of what I learned from building it. I had never met face-to-face with the users I created it for; we only collaborated via the internet. This made it imperative to achieve well written communication skills.
I was able to practice these written communications to translate functionality requests into requirements for the website. I learned the foundation of multi-tier architecture and the flexibility it can bring to a mid-sized application. I learned how to effectively discern between what was a feasible requirement with the technologies being used. I learned how to set a schedule of feature completions to reach my target release dates.
I spent a lot of time studying how to implement a multi-tier architecture. This was the first larger application that I had written and I wanted to make sure I got it right. After an initial attempt to “re-invent” the wheel I realized that one requirement of the website, news, may be beyond the scope of my expertise and had already been done by others. I chose to utilize Community Server (communityserver.org) to be the front “news” page and implement the other custom features myself.
NORMA Fact Editor - Developer
January 2007 – Present
Re-Architecting the Fact Editor for the open source NORMA tool. Updating this feature of the application to use the newly provided managed .NET 2.0 SDK extensions from older COM interfaces.
Technologies: Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2005 SDK, NET 2.0, NUnit
This artifact is the Neumont Object Role Modeling Architect (NORMA) fact editor. NORMA is a tool built on the Visual Studio SDK and Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools framework. It provides the ability to model domains using Object Role Modeling.
I’ve included the NORMA fact editor as an artifact because it shows that I have worked on a large project. NORMA is currently at 250,000 lines of code. Microsoft released new managed classes that implement the COM interfaces needed to integrate a custom text editor into Visual Studio. My goal was to take the existing fact editor and re-implement it using these new classes.
I acquired the realization that it takes quite a bit of time and effort to get familiarized with a large existing codebase. I learned how to analyze the existing code and summarize what was currently being used, then match those classes with the new ones provided by Microsoft. I learned the flexibility that interfaces can provide by allowing you to “plug-in” functionality where needed. I also gained a huge appreciation for developers who comment their code. There was a large number of classes that were not well documented which made the conversion process much harder.
Although it took awhile to familiarize myself with how the existing implementation was accomplishing its goals, I believe the end product was a success. The managed classes provided a much simpler implementation than what was there previously. Once the base Language Service was implemented it was trivial to add functionality such as the intellisense list shown.
YouRSS News Aggregator - Solution Architect, Technical Consultant
October 2006 – December 2006
Architected an RSS news aggregator that spanned desktop, web, and mobile applications. Researched and implemented the latest cutting edge technologies. Application provided a community sign-up site and was augmented with pushing information to desktop applications and mobile devices. Acted as the emerging technology liaison and provided group demonstrations, materials, and individual consulting for a six member team.
Technologies: WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), .NET 3.0, Web Services, ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Mobile 5.0, .NET Compact Framework 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, NUnit
This artifact is the Windows Communication Foundation service host application and Windows Presentation Foundation client application for the YouRSS news aggregator.
This artifact demonstrates my passion for new technologies and ability to help other developers learn new technologies. My team decided to use the new .NET 3.0 Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) to meet our needs for the desktop RSS news aggregator.
I helped the other developers on my team learn the new technologies by providing materials for them to research, as well as giving some demonstrations. I provided both group and individual coaching on how the technologies worked together. I was also able to gain a deeper understanding of the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) to build user interfaces in a real application.
Despite the lack of tool support we were able to pull together a simple application. Many of the team members spent extra time learning the new technology and showed me some things that I had never thought of doing previously.