I’m working on a survey application here at work. Nothing amazing, but it’s been interesting to start with something of a clean slate. You realize just how many things you do just because you’re used to doing them that way.

Things that have occurred to me to try, or to investigate on this thing:
– Should this really be a web application? Would it make sense to have it show up as a form in Outlook, such that the user never even leaves the email that requests them to fill out a survey?
– Would it make sense to use some of the Enterprise Library Blocks for security, caching, data access, etc, from Microsoft’s patterns and practices area, rather than custom-writing authentication and authorization code for this simple application?
– What about setting a template project so that Chris can hand it to his development team and say, here: out of the box security, logging, etc.?
– What about using an ORM tool, like NHibernate, rather than hand-coding a bunch of data-access layer code? If you do that with the data access block, though, you’d have two different data access idioms in use in the app: probably problematic for someone else to have to maintain. Probably the NHibernate thing itself would be problematic, in terms of other developers later maintaining…

All things to play with, though probably less than I’d like. Just need to get a basic survey app up and running – nothing too key here. But still would be nice to evaluate these other things and make recommendations for use here….