Martin W Smith

I’ve recently embarked on a new personal programming project and I though I might document my progress here on this blog. The project is a GTD App (see here to read about GTD if you don’t know what it it), I realise there are lots of these types of apps already out there, but none of the ones I’ve used have ticked all the boxes for me. I’m looking to write something that suits me, I don’t know if I will ever release it, this is more an exercise for honeing my skills, learning some new tchnologies and programming techniques. In my professional life I don’t often have the opportunity to write programs the way I want to, with this project I can. When I complete the project, if I decide to release it, I may make it open source, but there’s a long way to go yet before I need to start thinking about that.

I’m going to be writing my app in C# using Visual Studio 2010 and using NHibernate as my ORM and Persistance library, NUnit for Unit Testing, NAnt as my Build tool and SQL Server 2008 for the Backend Database. The plan is to make the app usable on multiple database platforms, such as Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server CE. I haven’t decided what I’m going to write the GUI in yet, I think I want to have a desktop version and a web version. For the desktop version I’m not sure whether to use standard Windows Forms or WPF or for the Web version, ASP.NET or Silverlight. I’m going to concentrate on the backend first and decide on the front end later.

I’ll post some more information as the project progresses.