Last year I put together a quick web app to let me keep track of which whiskies I’d liked and disliked at the Royal Mile Whiskies Whisky Fringe 2011. A few friends used it, some found it more useful than others and that was that.

That was hacked together in PHP against a MySQL database, neither of which are my bread-and-butter. While flexible, I’m a .NET developer so when it started heading towards the time to build it again this year I went with a different stack:

• ASP.NET MVC4
• SQL Server back-end
• Bootstrap for initial layout and styling (and responsive design)
• jQuery and custom scripting for some AJAX bits and bobs

I’ve loftier goals this year in the hope that others will find it useful. Last year it was to be little more than an aide memoire for the tipsy sampler though I managed to extract some fun statistics from it. This year I want to:

• Let you make a wishlist of things to sample ahead of the event to make sure you don’t miss anything
• Let you expose your wishlist and sampling lists publicly to friends and family (so that they have no excuses when your birthday or Christmas next comes around)
• Try to give a real-time impression of what’s making waves at the event
• Give more interesting stats at the end of the event to both the public and to the organisers and exhibitors
• Support a possible deployment to Azure to allow infrastructure scaling based on demand

Functionally it’ll be broadly the same as last year – navigable dram lists and big finger-friendly buttons to hit when you try something out, nice and simple. Hopefully there’ll be a demonstrator site up soon enough, so suggestions as to what it should include would be welcomed at whisky@pablissimo.com.

Over the next few weeks as things start coming together I’ll hopefully have time to document some of the development work.