Well, I had thought this solution would be really small but I quickly realized that I would need a lot to get it cool.
I struggled with my VM host that was freezing and I couldn’t really code decently for the first 2 days. That was a really terrible thing. The damn thing is a 10k server box with a decent graphics card. But server OSs simply don’t handle my card well.
Going to the experience. Razor is a really great way of writing asp.net pages. It reminds me so much of the first decent .Net Framework based framework I built. That was back in 2003. Good times. Me and my former business partner Rafael spent many nights building that framework which was used to build many products that our company, Cryo. delivered.
I also used EntityFramework 4.1. I’ll tell ya. What a great way of coding. I didn’t need to create a database. All my database is generated based on my design.
Given I was using MVC it just made more sense to use a test driven development approach which would be fairly affected it I had to go and change the database for each of my changes. Using EF4.1I would just change my classes and changes would be applied. Seemlessly.
At some point I decided to integrate my authentication with social networks. This means I would need to use some sort of OpenID integration. I downloaded FacebookSDK but I ended up deciding to have my version 1 using Janrain instead. Just so easy to do these integration nowadays.
I was pretty much ready to go live after 7 days coding for pretty much the whole day. Few things happened with the parties I had to liaise with(credit card gateway, host, design and so on) which led me to delay the release for few days.
Only good things happened then. Now I have a great integration with Facebook using the Social Plugins. Those are another piece of fantastic stuff 
There are few more I want to start using but I’ll wait for the next idea which, well, it is on its way already 
That said it is good to mention that the pledge payments are done through flo2cash. Credit card payments are done in a damn straight forward way of doing things as well.
After all I have to say that it is great to write software nowadays given there are so many things that are there for ya. You just plug things and there you go.
I do believe I can get even less data then I have now. I did a lot to avoid keeping any data I don’t need. There is one thing I believe I can do to not save that much data in my database.
Let’s see how things go.