On to TournamentCompare. I have been meaning to return to the Designing a Tournament series of articles for a while and it's really at the stage where I need some actual stats to pull together some comparisons. I had written a tournament analysis program back in 2006 to do some of the bias analysis, but since then I'd lost the Clarion development environment and couldn't continue modifying it for non-perfect play. So, a total rewrite is in order and hopefully make it web based and accessible for others to vet and build their own tournament types.
After a bit of digging it seems that another MVC application should be pretty easy, but use bootstrap to help with the presentation and graphs. Even though code first EF design seems to be more prevalent these days, I'm still a stickler for getting the data right so I've stuck with data first design.
Starting off the app in Visual Studio 2013 was pretty easy following this data first tutorial, although I'd created the MVC app first before creating the database. VS 2013 now has the ability to immediately add a SQL database right into the MVC project and create / modify tables and data right from within Visual Studio. I'm impressed! Within 1/2 hr I had the first TournamentTemplate tables done and looked like getting the others completed was just a matter of time. Went back to the tutorial to build up the entity framework for the starting tables, but unfortunately a VS crash took out the project connectors. Since it was so early I dumped and recreated the project with only the database making its way into the new project. EF done. Checked a quick update of the DB to make sure the EF would also update, and it looks pretty good so far.
