Lunchrtime on Mobilecrunch

I was psyched to fire up the newsreader tonight, pull the latest mobilecrunch stories and see my own "mobile 2.0" food ordering site, lunchrtime, as the top story.

Photoshop notwithstanding, I can't resist including a screenshot while this is still the latest mobilecrunch post.



What? Why? ... check out the about page. Is this going to be the next twitter? Probably not, but if the AdWords revenue covers the cost of the web services, I'll be pretty happy. If you like it, have fun, and maybe add in some restaurants near you.

Meantime, if you're up for some geekery, one of the things I loved about building the site was leveraging so many pieces of the asp.net platform to make it a little less code, a little more action with a very small amount of effort.

The entire app includes only around 300 lines of code and some markup. The total time to build, including the user-facing functionality, some quick admin bits, and the micro cms that I use to upload and serve pages with scanned menus like this? something like 70 hours. Total. It doesn't look as slick as it might, but if you've read this far you know I'm a developer and not a designer.

Here are the (mostly) asp.net pieces I used so I could be lazy, do my day job, and get this running:

• Built in Users and Roles infrastructure
• Built in Login widgets and automagic password reset by email for above
• Built in User profiles
• Asp.net Master pages
• Asp.net AJAX
• Mobile Web Forms adaptive rendering technology (needed a tiny bit of massaging, but there's an easy pattern for that too)
• Practically-writes-itself code to mash in SOAP services
• and REST services
• HTTP handlers for serving arbitrary data or acting as AJAX service endpoints
• SubSonic Data Access Layer, aka ActiveRecord on .net, so no database code
  
• FreeTextBox WYSIWYG HTML editing (I can't wait for 4.0 with the legendary Safari support)
• Flash
• Yahoo Maps Javascript API
• Asp.net hosting with SQL Server 2005 for under $10/month

It's a blast -- I really don't feel like I need to do much besides wave the baton, and all this stuff just comes together and starts playing in Visual Studio.

There are a bunch of solid web platforms out there today aside from asp.net. But anyone who thinks .net is somehow cumbersome, un-agile, un-fun, or not suitable for rapidly building and modifying a modern web app should really log out of the groupthink.