I decided, after poking around with Visual Studio 2010 Templates tonight, to publish a baseline infrastructure using ASP.NET MVC 3 w/ Razor, Entity Framework, and other elements using the .NET stack. So far I’ve only got some skeleton code put together for the infrastructure project and posted it to my github repo. I’d be open to fellow contributors or suggestions on what else I could or should fill out in the baseline template. Give it a view and let me know what you think.
I got to mess around with the Windows Phone 7 SDK finally over the last few weeks (Twitter hashtags #wp7 and #wp7dev). The first few things I noticed was that there are a lot of missing parts to it. Namely the calendar control I fussed about well over a month ago in Windows Phone 7 Calendar Control. Even with the missing elements I kept wondering what I could build that would be useful and might be a good open source project? I finally stumbled on the idea that I’d roll a few of my points of study together into one; Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Windows Phone 7. With that stumbling notion I navigated straight over to Codeplex and rolled a new project!
With that written, I hope I can get some of you cloud afficionados and gurus to put in a few hours a month to help build a rockin’ open source mobile admin app! If you’re interested please e-mail and I’ll get you setup on the project ASAP! 🙂
Here are my first few user stories just to get things started. If you think of other functionality, please feel free to add that to the comments below or to the tracking section on the Codeplex Project.
I snagged this quote from general web surfing. It stood out to me as something that generally applies to those in sciences, engineering, or software in the way we approach our work with predictions. Because really, most of what we do is based off of everyday experiments.
“Physicists have learned…that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is.” – Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman rocks, this guy is the quintessential curious rock star of science. I really agree with his attitude about life in so many ways.
A few questions came up recently that I wanted to answer, but before I answered I wanted to post them to see what others might think.
What are the most basic concepts of the application story needed to get started?
What should be assumed to be complete based on that after 1 week?
After 2 weeks are up, what could or should be delivered for a MVP (Minimally Viable Product)?
Ideally speaking development wouldn’t start until one has done a few paper prototyping sessions and written up a number of user stories. Often though just a minimal amount of things actually need to be known. My immediate answer to, “what is the most basic concepts of the application story needed to get started?” would be,
A simple story around the core prospective user of the application.
An example would be a story along these lines. Since I’m the user in this case, I’ll use “I” instead of “the user”.
I would like to access the application from anywhere in the world. I would like to have secure storage of my writing. I would be able to add writings to this storage. I would be able to delete writings from this storage.
That seems to be enough to build an extremely basic thing to store writings. Should someone need more than that to start creating something? Should someone be able to create a full fledged application? Sure, but without more work sessions and further stories to expand on the idea, I wouldn’t expect it to be what I was envisioning. I would simply expect something to be scratched out that we could start to work with. Something that would create, expand, and provide a better base of ideas in which to work with.
That’s the basis for this blog entry, what would you expect after one week and two weeks? Think of the ideal circumstances, with continual involvement with the developer and the customer. The developer being very familiar with the tools they’re using and the customer being very familiar with their particular business domain.
Thoughts? One week and two weeks. I’d like to see others’ thoughts on the matter.
So I got up on a Saturday, pondering what routes and buses would need to be taken to go from Belltown to Fremont here in the Seattle area. Because I live here and have a transit oriented mind (I do write Transit Sleuth also…) I know which buses come where that would make a trip to Fremont real easy. Fortunately there is a site called onebusaway.org here in Seattle that helps one that likes to effectively use transit. The core Metro, Pierce County, Sound Transit, and other sites are of minimal use in comparison. They can give you basic routing but other than that there isn’t a lot of other information for the hard core transit user.
So this Saturday morning I stumbled into an idea that wouldn’t be too expensive to implement within the cloud (either Azure or AWS). Here’s my initial idea without any research done except to know that somewhere, somehow, Metro, Sound Transit, and the other authorities in the Seattle area offer some type of data and GPS location feeds.
Transit & Logistics Cloud Idea
The connectivity shown in the diagram above is nice and all, but what exactly do I want for a front end? That’s the next point, what is needed is a truly flexible dashboard. One needs to be able to actually query against locations and find multiple options to the various places they’re trying to travel to. For instance, the trip from Belltown to Fremont isn’t just one bus. I could easily get the 17, 30, 26, or 28. But there isn’t an easy way to identify and track all of the nearby bus stop locations that those buses travel by on their route. That’s where a dashboard of statuses and location information would come into play.
The idea would be able to track multiple bus stops in a particular location for various buses going in all directions. This seems like a feasible idea. The extension of that would be to get the stops within X distance from a particular location, possibly derived from an iPhone or some such. I’d like to use this on an RIA for the Windows 7 Series, Blackberry, and iPhone – which I assume would be a boon for anyone that uses the Metro, Sound Transit, or surrounding services.
I have collected the following information for this prospective project.
The onebusaway.orgOpen Source Project that currently does bus tracking and other transit related information has some great research done already, which may be useful.
A really good discovery I found was the UW Research. This site has all sorts of web services information related to traffic and transit. In addition there is specific .NET examples and such. Always nice to see the examples in the code or tech stack that I intend to use.
I decided, after poking around with Visual Studio 2010 Templates tonight, to publish a baseline infrastructure using ASP.NET MVC 3 w/ Razor, Entity Framework, and other elements using the .NET stack. So far I’ve only got some skeleton code put together for the infrastructure project and posted it to my github repo. I’d be open to fellow contributors or suggestions on what else I could or should fill out in the baseline template. Give it a view and let me know what you think.
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