Hello my friends!

This quick post is to share the exciting news with you that atfer nearly 12 months of dev, countless sleepless nights, tons of coffee, my latest application - Viewing Booker is now completed!!!

Before you read the rest, have a look at quick video to get the idea of what the app is about: 

 

I came up with this idea back in March 2013 when I was going on a 2 months trip round the world. I was renting a really cool place in Shoreditch London at that time, which I wanted to keep upon my return. I decided to put an advert on Gumtree and then it all happend - I got bombarded with tens of emails - each following "hi, when can I view it?" boring fashion. I searched for an app that could help with it but none was available at that time, so I come up with a very rough idea for solving the problem, which was later named Viewing Booker. 

Viewing Booker is a true multi platform service that has a cloud hosted website and mobile API as well as the native apps for Android and iOS. Working with this project gave me a great in-depth knowledge of Microsoft's latest tech stack - mvc5/web api 2, microsoft identity (working on different plaforms), Xamarin, Azure, security architecture and also polished my frontend skills using bootstrap and knockout.js. 

Hosted on windows azure, system is composed of the following elements:

- Webiste - viewingbooker.com built on MVC 5
- API  service  for mobile app access and data - built on Web API 2
- Service Bus for sending push notifications to the mobile devices
- iOS and Android applications built using Xamarin 
- Scheduler for automating viewing reminders etc. 

Viewing Booker .com System Diagram

The future architectural changes I am planning are to move all business logic to the "API" and make client facing app run on .NET Core/Angular or Angular/Node talking directly to AD B2C (IaaS) and the API App. Also, I am planning to split the Business Logic into more independent microservices.

So.... visit http://viewingbooker.com and if you like the idea, there is a "Share on Facebook" button which you are more than welcome to click!

And finally... very big thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring all the neccessary software and hosting for this service!