Scoring goals with DevForce

One day while talking about soccer with a friend, I came up with an idea for a new fantasy soccer application. The current Yahoo! Fantasy Soccer that we’re playing gets boring after a few weeks. We have a ton of fun with Yahoo’s other Fantasy products, primarily because there are a lot of statistics and updates throughout the week for their basketball, football, and baseball products whereas their fantasy soccer product only updates at most once a week. The drafting model used in Yahoo! Fantasy Basketball and Yahoo! Fantasy Football also make them more fun because it forces you to have some knowledge of the players that you pick—giving you more of a personal connection with your own fantasy team.

Background

My programming experience is mainly desktop/WinClient that includes C, C++, C#, VB 6.0, VB.Net and Java. I have some knowledge in HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. Given that background, I wrote a CRUD application using C# WinForms to update the database (which is in XML format). I knew very little about Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Moving forward

After being hired by IdeaBlade, I quickly learned a lot about how DevForce works—as well as RIA. I’ve also seen why Silverlight is the next big thing in writing RIAs. That’s when I decided to convert my app to Silverlight using DevForce as my primary tool.
I know what I need to accomplish in the next few weeks to make this happen, and I’d like to share my experiences with you as I move forward.
Here’s my game plan:

1. Create an SQL database that consists of Club, Player, and GameStat tables.
2. Write a conversion app that converts the XML database into a business object and stores it inside the SQL database.
3. Convert the WinForm CRUD application to a Silverlight CRUD application using DevForce to generate the Fantasy Soccer models.
4. Add validation to the app.
5. Add search and update features to the app.
6. Deploy the app so my friend can help me maintain the database.