What's your ideal C# project built upon?

Question

I'm starting a new personal project on the side, so this is the first time I'll be able to start from the ground up on a larger project since ASP.NET 2.0 was first released. I'd like this to also be a good learning experience for me, so right now I'm planning on building this upon ASP.NET MVC, Castle ActiveRecord, and Ninject. I'm most comfortable with MbUnit for unit testing and CruiseControl for CI so right now they are the front runners.

But what would be your first additions once you click "New Solution"? Open Source, commercial, whatever. I have an open mind if they look like they can make it do what it do.

Answer 1

Built on nothing. Personally, I'm not a big fan of using frameworks and pre-built components for every single aspect of my project. I like to be in control of all the code, and write all the code myself. You could call it an extreme case of not invented here syndrome. Or you could say, if it's a core business function, do it yourself.

Answer 2

I prefer Microsoft Unity for IoC, for NHibernate make sure you look into Fluent NHibernate and say good bye to the xml garbage!

I wrote my own version of the Web Client Software Factory that leverages Unity instead of ObjectBuilder(1) that's included as I ran into numerous issues with it, at some point it will be blogged about in a series of posts but the source code is already on my site which you can view in my profile.

If your project is for an enterprise in all honesty I would recommend against using the MVC Framework. It's such a large derivation from web forms that you will find many developers that don't live and breathe coding will not be able to use it correctly and you will constantly be fighting to keep the MVC usage correct as most developers will treat it the same way as web forms.