Playing With Microsoft MVC

Now that I have a little more free time on my hands I have been trying out some new stuff. I kept hearing about Microsoft MVC and I wanted to play around with it some. The online tutorial was a movie database that I instantly saw as potential to adapt to a Milage application.

See I've been keeping track of the gas milage for our family car's since 2000. I started with my Handspring Visor which ran the PalmOS. I bought a spreadsheet application and entered the milage that way. When I moved to the Pocket PC 2003 OS on my iPaq 2215, I was able to bring over my spreadsheets and continued to enter them via Excel. I even built a couple prototype applications using the C# compact framework but it was always easier to use Pocket Excel than any clunky UI/DB I came up with. Espesially since I could graph, sum, etc quite easily in Excel on my desktop. Even when I switched to a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone I still found myself entering data via a spreadsheet since I always had done it that way.

Today I am using an iPhone and have been reluctant to spend any money on an application to read/write excel files since I will most likely switch phones again in the near future. And since my phone is essentially on the web 24/7 I thought, why don't I write a web application so I can enter data more easily and learn something new?

Using the Microsoft MVC tutorial I am slowly (job hunting is my current priority) working on my new Milage Web application. The first few steps to get this working will be:

• Defining my database and learning the how the entities framework works - CHECK
• Get the MVC tutorial working on my hosted server along side BlogEngine.Net - CHECK
• Using ADO.Net to connect to my current spreadsheet as a DB and importing all my existing data into a SQL database - (Importer works, still need to import)
• Fix up Edit page to do paging for existing data.
• Fix up Edit page so create new works well in Safari on my iPhone
• Fix up Home to show graph of MPG for current car. (Google chart working, going to try Microsoft Chart)
• Fix up Home to give some interesting details for total cost for gas, total cost per vehicle, last purchse, etc.
• Security so that only I can add data.
• Use jQuery somehow in UI to learn something about it

Hopefully this will be a fun little exersize for myself and I might be able to use it as an example for a potential employer.

-Jeff