Notoriously Databased v0.2

After discussing with Andrew the benifits of MVC3 and AppHarbor, I was finally convinced that it was the way to go for the next step of developing Notorious. Hopefully it will allow a little more freedom in testing as I'll be able to fully automate the process and serve it up as a web app rather than Google Doc forms. Been a pretty long journey to get all the setup in place:

 - Looks like I'll need MVC3, EntityFramework, and AppHarbor testing
 - MVC3 needed Visual Studio 2010 sp1.  (250Mb)
 - Downloaded Windows Platform Installer to speed up the process. It was able to get most, but not entity Framework.
 - Tested MVC3 apps locally.
 - Downloaded GIT and merged local app to cloud
 - Needed to move data over to SQL, so downloaded 2012 SQL Management studio (600Mb)
 - Needs Windows 7 sp1, so it and another ~100 windows updates later ..
 - Management studio didn't seem to work by itself, so decided to move to 2012 express as well (200Mb)
 - Installed and running, and apparently management studio 2012 now magically works.
 - Played around with developing tables, and then merging them into MVC using entity frameworks. Lots of guidance by tutorials as this was not obvious. Eventual model first approach seems pretty slick rather than building LINQ.
 - Merged to cloud and then needed to figure out cloud connection. I could see the db fine in Management studio using the given user / pass, but couldn't connect to it using the app. finally figured out that it's rewriting the connection string itself. All I needed to do was to provide an alias to the model's connection string and also the resource metadata. 5 hours :/.
 - Looked at merging the data in case I neded to to that later on, but couldn't get a nice, simple way to do it across servers (I'm pretty sure the apharbour user doesn't have the right privelages for most options)
 - Ready to go!

3 days to get into a position to develop, and possibly 20 hours. Most of that was waiting for downloads, so maybe 8 hours in watching tutorials and testing stuff.

With all the tucked away, I spent 1/2 hr designing the table layout for the new NotoriouslyDatabased app. After building the guts of it on Google Docs, it's going to be pretty easy to convert the logic, but the file layout changes might mean a different approach is possible.