OK.  I admit it.  I have been horrible at this blogging thing.  However, I have made a commitment to get better at it so here goes. 

I have many crazy ideas when it comes to coding and how to make my processes better and now is the time to get them down on paper and get your feedback.  Now, these ideas might not be nearly as wild and crazy as Charlie Sheen, but at least they help me get through my coding assignments.

So let’s start by laying out the vision and objectives of this exercise.  I have been trying to come up with the best set of tools, tips and practices so I can get a small team to be as productive as possible without burning out my resources.  My thoughts tend to lean towards the coding practices first as this is what I have been doing for years.  However, as one looks at the process as a whole, we need to remember to keep the users in mind.  If we don’t have a user to accept our application, do we really have an application in the first place?

I have been using a commercial framework from DevExpress called eXpress Application Framework (XAF) with their eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) behind the scenes for a few years.  We have had tremendous success with it and even implemented a code generation layer to save us some time.  Now we want more!!!

My goals here are to create a technical stack that employs as many UI’s as possible, while being true to the layers and documenting the process along the way.  I will continue to have a series of these posts that will walk through each step as I work on it.  Right now here is what I have planned:

1. Defining the solution
2. SCRUM/Agile Story Planning
3. Overview of Architectural Plan
4. Feature Driven Development
5. Domain Driven Development
6. Persistence Layer with XPO
7. Windows UI with XAF/XPO
8. Web UI with XAF/XPO
9. OData Services Layer
10. Windows Mobile UI
11. Android UI
12. iPhone UI
13. Blackberry UI
14. Excel UI
15. Outlook UI
16. Lessons Learned

I will explain the solution that I plan to implement in the next post. 

Thanks again and let me know what you think.