On Friday 19th February 2010, a group of 38 individual gather to race through the next 2 nights and 3 days to build, demo and pitch new concepts, ideas and ultimately demonstrate innovation.

Yes, I was one of these 38, enduring two days with only 2.5 hours of sleep. Nothing else mattered, but delivering the promised goods. My team of 4 – successfully and proudly delivered this service: ChefMeUp.com

Since this is a technical blog, I wont bore you with the emotional details of the three days, but I will introduce you to the team that made this happen.

Casey Butler – Role: PR/Marketing
Casey is a start-up founder and a musician who has come to StartupCamp Sydney to practice business and polish his skills for the real world. His role in building the business case and drumming the PR and marketing is critical to the success of the project. BTW, he flew all the way from Melbourne to be here in Sydney.

Dave Trindall – Role: Developer
Dave is an active developer specialises in the Microsoft technology stack. His dedication to development have lead him to StartupCamp Sydney III to demonstrate his knowledge and experience. Dave’s newest website launch is his meaningful short URL service found at: http://ko.ly/

Brett Samuel – Role: Graphic Designer
Brett’s background is business development and entrepreneurship. has successfully established and sold his last business, Brett gravitated to StartupCamp Sydney III to learn and share the experience of a new atmosphere and innovation.

Sarmaad Amin – Role: Developer
Sarmaad is a .Net enterprise application developer that have worked on may successful IT projects. He came to StartupCamp Sydney III to explore new innovation and develop ideas in a different environment that cultivate innovation. His experience in software development contributed to the successful completion and launch of the project at StartupCamp Sydney.

“ChefMeUp.com is a project born in 11 hours , from zero code to completion 100% borrowed code free”

That’s right, the website was completed and fully functional with 11 hours of nothing but pure development and excitement.

This is a short run down of the technology.

I have opt-in to use LLBLGen Pro as our ORM layer with Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The front end is designed and coded using ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2, yes, using Visual Studio 2010 RC.

I have to say, this is the fasted development I have been involved in, even for a fully functional prototype and without using the MVC framework, I doubt it would have finished on time.

the features of the application includes:

• complete login/registration system for Chefs to list their services
• paypal integration for registration payment
• twitter integration for posting to twitter network and update from it.
• Bing map integration to display the chefs/restaurant registered in the network.

basically all the necessary plumping to operate a web 2.0 style vertical industry service directory business. which in our case we choose Chef and other cooking services.

have a look at our presentation. BTW, I wasn’t there because I was building the better website… ;)

Check out the website ChefMeUp.com and let me know what you thing and if you are interested in the source code, send me an email or leave a comment on this post and I would send you a copy.

now to go and get some more sleep, happy coding…

Well, another nice day in the office today… just finalised the last minute touches on our asset management system solution, that is due for a demo anytime now. very happy with the results so far.

One of our clients has approached us about a month ago to develop a CHEP pallet management system for their organisation and now we demo it to them.

this is our first demo to the stakeholders of the project and I am really excited to get their feedback on our hard work. enough talking… this time I am including a screenshot of couple of pages of the application…

This screenshot is from the administration system.
showing the stocktake list that are entered from deferent sites.

As you can see, Its a web based pallet management system. the application if fully Ajaxified which makes it easy to use and operate.

I have also included this screenshot from the site portal showing the process of sending pallets from Sydney location to another CHEP depo.

this is by far one of the nicest applications I have ever worked on. it uses few different technologies and tools.
We used Microsoft Queue Messaging System to place a job to generate the export files to sent to CHEP for invoicing and we used Telerik Reporting component to generate the report needed by management.

well, this application might be up and running now, but we are working on some really nice dashboard tools the aim is to provide a way for the administrator to build their dashboard by selecting the type of chart and “plug-in” the parameters to configure the chart.

once that done, I will definitely keep you posted…

for now, I am out. Have fun and code well…

LocalLens is an online business directory built around the concept of building communities and focusing on offering a multitude of features to businesses. Enough on the plug, lets talk about the technology…

It might look like just another business directory. However, what’s under the hood what really makes it tick for me.

I have been contributing to this project for just over 6 months now. My main role is to build the architecture and the framework to be as flexible, robust and functional as possible, yet still maintain best coding practises and use well defined development patterns.

So, what under the hood?

Database Server: MS SQL 2008 as data storage
Language and frameworks: c#, .Net 3.5, Linq, Web Services, JSON
ORM: LLBLGEN as our database abstraction layer 
Logging: log4net as our logging platform
UI & Reporting Tools: Telerik AJAX .Net Controls
Search Tool: linq to lucene, lucene.net
Patterns Used: Singleton, Provider, DDD, TDD

locallens is built using 4 tires that work together to bring the website to life, allowing for further growth and integration with other systems.

An example would be to extend the businesses and events to an iPhone application that would serve the data straight out of the website to the iphone app, without any further development.

I will spend more time in another post talking about some techniques that I have useful in using LLBLGEN as our ORM platform in multi-tired web applications.

for now, if you like to have a look at the website and give me a feedback that would be great.

locallens.com.au (keep in mind, its currently in RC1 and not all the content there yet)