Creating my home assistant

This post is part 1 of a series: [ Part 2 ]

There’s a bunch of technologies I need to learn and some I need to improve. So I’ve decided to make my self an application and use as many of these concepts and technologies as possible (where they make sense that is).

So I needed a problem that I could solve and found one right under my nose. A home assistant, or family planer if you will. An application that will let me, my girlfriend and my (soon) four kids organize our family life, our schedules, our house and everything that involves two or more of us. I have a bunch of stuff I want to put into the program, in a vague and semi prioritized list:

• A common task list – stuff that needs to be done around the house
  • assignable to persons
  • time limit
• Lists – shopping lists, packing lists, etc.
  • Being able to reuse lists
• Schedules – who’s doing what when?
  • Ability to view all schedules at the same screen.
  • Alerts, preferably sent to mobile but also via IM
• House maintenance log – when did we paint it and what color, what work has been done, etc
  • Upload pictures
  • Print documentation, for instance when I’m selling it.
• Photo album
  • the ability to share photos with select persons.
• Mobile web client – I might not be near my PC when I need info
  • First read version
  • then write / edit version
• Info screen – an application or page that can be continuously displayed in the house, showing everyone what’s going on.
• And whatever else I might think of. Since I’m the product owner I can add to or change the backlog later.

There’s also some nonfunctional requirements

• Since my girlfriend is very resistant to change (I have no idea if I’ll ever get her to use this program) I’ll have to make it as painless and easy as possible to use this program. That probably also means using Facebook for authentication since she’s got an FB account.
• The main application will be a web application to make it easy to use it from multiple machines.

Technology and methodology

• I’ll be using Visual Studio 2010 to build it and use ASP.NET MVC 2. I need to familiarize me with both.
• I want to try out the Spark view engine, it looks really promising.
• I’ll try and create as much as possible from the outside and in with TDD, delaying the rest of my decisions as long as possible.
• I want to try the LINQ for Mocks format in Moq
• I want to use NHibernate with the fluent mappings and Linq.
• The rest will come along as I go.

Oh, and I plan to blog about every step along the way and open sourcing the code, making this into a full tutorial.

See ya!