App Building with the VB Team

Where have I been all week! Sheesh! Well I've been heads down doing some "App Building" with the VB team this week testing all the new features of Visual Studio and Visual Basic. I have to say it's looking really good!

I decided to create a typical n-tier business application (I know boring, but reality!) that manages incoming orders for local pizzerias. It has a Winform client that displays a huge (touch) screen of incoming orders to the kitchen. It also has a piece that the pizzeria can use to take orders over the phone and enter them into the system quickly. It can also map out the customer addresses for the delivery people using the MapPoint web services. It uses WCF services, N-tier Datasets, Winforms, MapPoint Web Services, LINQ, SQL-Server 2005 Express so far. I'm actually a newbie on a lot of these features and it's only taken me 2 full days to get the application together and running perfectly. I have to say that Intellisense is so much better and LINQ makes churning through the data extreemely easy and productive. Even the way I design the UI is changing because of LINQ and using it with data-binding.

Now I’m creating the final piece that will be a Silverlight client for customers to order over the web. I built the database so that it can handle multiple stores so I want to display the stores first based on the customer’s address and then they can enter the order. If I can pull this piece off then it will make for a very compelling architecture. Wish me luck ;-)

P.s. I'll post this as an Orcas sample application when all is said and done.