Technology Selection and Evaluation

[robbiedhickey]

So, I'm fighting the urge to go too overboard with bleeding edge stuff here. I know we want to keep things semi-practical and applicable to our current skill-sets. We want to evolve them without throwing away our current resume.

Technology Options

Here are my initial thoughts based on earlier discussions I've had with you about our goals. Not set in stone:

• Hosting: Azure
• Database: Azure SQL/SQL Server/Azure DocumentDB
  • Relational vs unstructured/nosql?
• Data Access: Entity Framework 7 w/ migrations - really want to learn migrations :)
• API: ASP.NET 5
  • Newest version of .NET combines MVC/WebApi
• UI: Angular/React/Aurelia
• Mobile: Depends on front-end UI framework.
  • Angular: http://ionicframework.com/
  • React: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/
• Authentication: IdentityServer v3

  Technical Goals

A lot of this might seem like overkill, but since this is a learning experience I would like to incorporate as many of these as possible.

• Seamless local development experience
  • Automated local dev environment with Docker image(s)
  • Database process must have seeding/migrations so we can drop/create cheaply and easily.
• Have true continuous integration with completely automated and gated deployments.
  • test suite enforcement via CI
  • db migrations via CI
  • style enforcement via CI
  • Option for CI: http://www.appveyor.com/
• Write client side app using modern tools and techniques
  • Leverage ES6/ES2016 or TypeScript
  • Modern build pipeline (gulp/browserify/webpack)
  • Client-side test coverage
• Fully async API w/ CQRS on the server side.
  • Mediatr supports async and a nice, simple model for encapsulating this: https://github.com/jbogard/MediatR
• Service bus for long running or recurring tasks. (email reminders, ETL)
• Fully instrumented for logging and performance (on both the client and the server)
• Incorporate separate caching layer (whatever azure offers)