Over my head

Now that we've finally decided the technology we're going to use to build the new version of ListenTo, we're starting to think in terms of new functionality and improving the user experience.

ListenTo needs bands and needs the bands to interact with the site in order to generate some of our content.

We've never had problems getting bands to sign up, but have had problems with getting to come back to the site to interact.

I'm in a band called Seizures and one things I've realised from talking to the guys in the band and other members of the local music community is that people in bands generally have an element of narcissism to their personalities.

After reading this article we realised that allowing people to add the photos they've taken at gigs and tagging the bands in the photos may draw bands back to the site.

For example, one of our photographers or users takes a photo of Seizures during a gig, uploads it to ListenTo and tags us. The band members get an email telling them they've been tagged, so they visit the site and look at the new photos and perhaps add content themselves.

This is not a new idea facebook and myspace all do this, but I think it is new to our style of website. We arent a social networking site, really we're about promoting the gigs of local bands, but taking some of the ideas that these sites use so successfully may work.

We'll have a few original ideas in the next release too - I'm not telling though.

I've just started re-developing ListenToManchester.

I seem to do this every 6 months. It goes something like this...

A new technology comes along.

I get excited.

I begin redeveloping the site with this new technology (ie Ruby on Rails, s#arp).

I discover that the flavour of the month isnt quite as good as I expected and that my productivity isnt quite what I was promised (I usually want to have it completed in a few days).

Most recently I looked at S#arp which is a framework based on nHibernate (yay), Spring.NET (yayer) and the new MVC preview from Microsoft.

I love MVC.
I love nHibernate.
I love Spring.NET.

I dont like s#arp based upon what I've seen of the "best practice" NorthwindMVC project shipped with the project.

The NorthwindMVC.Core project contains the business logic of the application.

It also contains nHibernate mapping files.

Why would they do this??

I dont want my business tier to have any dependency upon the implementation of my data access tier!!!

Ideally I'd have a seperate project that defines interfaces i.e. ISupplierDAO (lets call it NorthwindMVC.Shared).

Using spring I'd inject an implementation of this interface into my business tier.

I dont want to care about the details of the DAO implementation in my Business layer!

This way my business and data tiers only depend upon NorthwindMVC.Shared!!

Is this really how the devs of this platform want us to use it?

Of course, I'm probably being a bit whiney. This is probably just an implementation detail.

Thoughts??

Having said all this, this framework is leaps and bounds better than what ListenTo is currently running off CSLA.NET (shudders).