DinnerNow.NET - Ship Happens

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Today, at 7pm, we made the final release version of DinnerNow.NET. Its been a long road from James Conard's early ideas to the finished package.

What is DinnerNow.NET?

DinnerNow is a fictious marketplace where customers can order food from local restaurants for delivery to their home or office. The sample is designed to demonstrate how you can develop a connected application using several new Microsoft technologies.

The demo utilizes technologies including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, Linq, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Powershell, and the .NET Compact Framework.

Why is DinnerNow.NET different?

The biggest difference is not so much the multitude of technologies used, but what we ended up doing to make it just "work".

The first thing about big "joiny-up-demos" is that you spend most of your time trying to get the thing to work. We spent a lot of time trying to make this as easy as possible. We ship the whole pacakge in a single MSI. We provide a way to check you have all the required bits installed, and scripts to build and configure everything too. (we also give you the source for everything so you can use it in your projects)

The whole project was managed in a TFS server run by our IT folks. We have custom Windows PowerShell scripts (actually the whole source control build process, deploy is invested with powershell scripts. We found it much easier to solve problems in Powershell than anything else, including .net framework console applications) to build the MSI - (which only contains source code).

We have some extreemly talented people working on DinnerNow.NET and it has been great working with them all.

What is exciting about DinnerNow.NET?

We released version 1, but that is just the start. You will see when you download it, its on codeplex. We are going to continue to develop DinnerNow.NET and you're going to help with ideas, bug reports and talent. It may take a day or 2 for everything to come online, but start now by downloading the demo onto your Vista or Windows Server "Longhorn" machine/vpc, install using the MSI and follow the (hopefully) obvious desktop shortcuts.