I talked last time about coming up with my own sample application to use as a framework for learning various Microsoft technologies like Silverlight, WPF and WCF.  I ended up deciding on a book tracking web site, books being one of my great passions.  I spent the rest of the post in describing the mission objectives for the yabts.com web site.

Actually, it wasn’t quite a slam dunk to pick book tracking as my sample application.  My second choice, representing another great passion of mine, was to do a web site to track movies and DVDs.  I’m hugely passionate about movies and DVDs and I’ve always wanted a killer app that helped me keep track of DVDs that I own and movies that I’ve seen or want to see.

Since I’m a glutton for punishment, I figure that I don’t have to actually pick just one of these two applications.  Why not build both?

So, with that, here’s my 2nd sample application, also already registered with godaddy.com as a bona fide domain:

yamts.com – Yet Another Movie Tracking Site

Another obviously lovely name.

Mission Statement

As with the book tracking site, the first thing to do is to state what this little movie application is going to do:

The purpose of the movies web site is to keep track of the movies that I own, movies that I’ve seen and the movies that I want to see.

Perfect.  A nice parallel to a book web site.

Mission Objectives

And, just like before, we also need to lay out some “mission objectives”.  This will be a short list of things that my little movie application is going to let a user do:

• Keep track of all DVDs that I own
• Keep track of all movies that I’ve seen
• For the movies that I own, keep track of whether I’ve seen them or not
• Access a list of all my movies from the web
• Access all my movie lists from the web
• Keep track of all movies that I want to see
• Record my impressions/thoughts, for movies that I’ve seen
• Keep track of recommended lists of movies to see (e.g. AFI movie lists)
• Track my progress as I try to see all movies in the lists
• Share my movie lists with other people
• Let other people track their own DVDs
• Let other people track their own lists of movies that they’ve seen or want to see
• Keep track of movies-seen and movies-to-see for various family members
• Browse through movies by genre or actor
• Browse through lists of award-winning movies
• Organize my DVDs by genre and topic
• Organize my list of movies to see by genre and topic

Once again, this got a little bit out of control at the end.  But you get the idea.

Where Are We?

There you have it, a second candidate for a sample application.  Next time, we’ll also do some data modeling for this guy, too.