FedEx Day

[SleeperService.ps]

So we had our first FedEx day at our work. It is apparently based on Google 20% time where google staff get 20% of the time to develop anything they want. You get 24 hours to develop something from idea to a working application.

This australian company do a lot of them.

http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/fedex/

I did a equiptment tracking website using ASP.Net MVC2 using Visual Studio 2010.

The model was generated by Entity Framework from a database deployed to SQL Azure and the result is running on Windows Azure.

I was surprised at how well it all came together, even if my end product wasn't polished, considering they are young MS technologies who notoriously take a while to get things 'right'. MVC2 has definatley benifited from being community driven.

I was up against iphone, windows 7 phone, MS lightswitch beta (a automatic UI generation tool that generates your UI from a database design and is very beta) apps and managed to win. Didn't win anything except a novelty FedEx mouse but it was a peer vote system. It was a good fun thing to do at work and interesting to see how the teams approached there projects, some were quite ambitious and forgot to KISS for the 1 day limit.

Azure is interesting and SQL Azure may need to be extended but for simple database design it works well. MVC2 is very nice and if you develop websites in MS then I recommend it. The http://stackexchange.com/ sites were developed in using MVC1.

[Dr.Strangelove.ps]

[Post Script.ps]

All this techno babble means nothing to me but I'm glad you won Sleeper!