I started with the best of intentions. Add caching to the site using Windows Azure Appfabric Caching. As I started to gut the pages to add in caching, I lamented that I didn't spend much of the initial flurry of activity on writing unit tests, which would have made me feel more comfortable about the changes I was making.

So I spent a few days writing unit tests and refactoring my controllers to be more testable, removing dependencies on the http context and refactoring for a bit more structured and elegant code.

Once that was in place I implemented the caching, which was pretty straightforward except for one thing. Since the configuration section used was a collection of datacacheclients, I thought it would be neat to get windows server appfabric caching and swap between them depending on whether I was doing a dev build or a release build. The cache client had the same name and were in an assembly of the same name, so I thought it would be straight forward. But it turns out the Azure assembly is version 101.0.0.0 and the Windows server is version 1.0.0.0 and are completely incompatible.

When I gave up, I had to deal a slew of errors, because apparently azure only likes it if you name your datacacheclient "default".

Anyway, once I got the configuration squared away, implementing caching was pretty straightforward.

At the same time, I starting looking for help with the design of the site. I pursued a couple of leads, but couldn't find anyone I was comfortable with, so I decided to try to do it myself. (famous last words...)

So I think I have a nicer layout, which I plan on rolling out, but as I thought about usability and my original vision of "once found" as a research tool, I started working on major changes to the site.

First decision I made was for no more polls. I'm ripping them out. Most topics they didn't make sense, and the few people I got to try the site were entering answers that should have been comments. Comments will be prominent, with links in the sidebar. 

I want to turn this into a research tool. When this is ready, I'll launch OnceFound, which will allow for research any topic, with each question site a more specific version of the site. With this in mind, here is how I picture people using it.

• For each topic, users will be able to drag and drop the links and comments in any order they please. The relative rankings each users give will calculate a "score" which could then be used to guess where links appear in the shared rankings. As new links are ranked, they could appear where we think a user would rank that link if they vote like other users. They can also remove a link or comment from their personal view and switch to the shared view.
• For each topic, users can maintain a personal log that is not shared with other users.
• Pages will show usernames of other users "researching" the topic ordered by their activity level on the topic. Will implement a user messaging feature.

Basically I see each topic page as a research hub, which I want to enable multiple people to combine resources.

Here's a very preliminary screenshot to give you an idea of the basic future layout (content areas are not styled yet).

This will be a lot of work and not all of that may make it into the first iteration. Will provide updates as more work gets done.

Here's my tentative plan for the sites: (in no particular order)

• Find a graphic designer to help come up with a better UI/User Experience. I think people can tell the site was designed by a developer. The current layout came from a free MVC template from the MVC 1.0 Gallery of templates on codeplex. If you know anyone who can help with this, let me know, otherwise I might have to outsource to oDesk, 99Designs or Crowdspring.
• Implement a more robust caching strategy leveraging Azure's Caching.
• Add a related Twitter Tweets widget to the topics pages. (Started looking at their API's and they looked interesting), and may give some default content to new pages.
• Use Windows Azure Access Control Services (ACS) to enable login through Google and Facebook. Part of broader strategy to integrate the sites with Facebook via their API's. Plus already viewed the Pluralsight training on this, and looks pretty easy to implement.
• Change the Voting strategy of the site. In the interest of reducing friction for using the site, currently anonymous users can vote and submit. JavaScript cookies are all that prevent users from voting over and over again. Eventually I'd like to build a more robust solution, storing user votes in Azure table storage. Right now all the data is in SQL Azure, but depending on how this goes, maybe its worth moving other items into Table or Blob Storage.
• Create a "curator" role either for topics or tags, to allow notifications when content changes. Hoping to give users the ability to monitor the site. Also allow these users to modify content (answers, comments, etc)
• Add a set of FAQ pages
• Add RSS Feed Support for tags or topics.
• Figure out how to implement a robust search function and implement it.
• Leverage above mentioned search functionality to automatically identify and handle duplicate topics like google does with "Did you mean?". Maybe depending on the confidence level, display a page with similar sounding question instead of creating a new topic, like we do today, which I think is a cool feature for now.
• Figure out how to monetize the site. I was rejected from Adsense due to a lack of content. 
• Come up with a better content strategy. I might end up finding a virtual assistant or someone to help seed the site with content. 
• Build out a better deployment strategy. I've grown tired of waiting for all the servers to be updated whenever I deploy a new package. I've heard of quick web deployments using the Windows Azure accelerator for web roles, and it's something I'm thinking of looking once the pain has become too much. And as far as automated builds go, I'm looking of forward to seeing how it will fit together with git. Right now, I'm pushing all my code to bit bucket before every deployment as a practice and it's worked out nice so far.
• Create a catch all site, "OnceFound" to describe the purpose of all of this. Eventually the plan could be to acquire more domains and leverage the same technology, or perhaps allow others to use this technology to park question oriented domains (become a host).

Sounds like enough to keep me busy for a while.

If anyone else has any other ideas, let me know.

I created a "store" server control that will handle registering a data model and creating a store and filling it with data from the data source. Since it inherits from CompositeDataBounControl, you can set the DataSource property or specify the DataSourceID of any ASP.Net data source control. Finally you need only set your widgets store property to the same ID that the store uses to have that component work off of that store.

Here is the ASPX markup for a simple object data source, store and List control (similar to the List sencha touch sample):

<asp:ObjectDataSource runat="server" SelectMethod="GetContacts" TypeName="Contact"></asp:ObjectDataSource>

<SD:Store runat="server" DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1" >

  <sorters>

    <SU:Sorter property="FirstName" />

  </sorters>

  <getGroupString>

  function(record) {

    return record.get('lastName')[0];

  }

  </getGroupString>

</SD:Store>

<ST:List fullscreen="true" runat="server" grouped="true" indexBar="false" store="contactsStore">

  <div class="contact2"><strong>{firstName}</strong> {lastName}</div>

</ST:List>

Couple things to note, the GetContacts method is a simple method that dummy's up some names in a list. I've also tested with a SqlDataSource with parameters which also works fine. Right now the component will render every property of the data item, though I can imagine adding properties to allow folks to control which columns will be rendered.

I also have been playing with PersistanceMode and the ParseChildren property to improve the readability. The store supports this for Sorters and Filters and the GetGroupString property, which allows you to easily specify a custom javaScript function to get the groups. The list component itself maps the inner content to the itemTpl property which allows you to easily setup a tpl template using the standard Sencha Touch {fieldName} syntax.

This markup will output the following javaScript into the head of the page:

Ext.regModel('contactsStore_Model', {

            fields: ['firstName','lastName']

        });

        var contactsStore = new Ext.data.Store({

                model: 'contactsStore_Model'

                , data: [ {firstName:'Captain',lastName:'America'},

{firstName:'Tony',lastName:'Stark'},

{firstName:'Super',lastName:'Man'},

{firstName:'Wonder',lastName:'Woman'},

{firstName:'Peter',lastName:'Parker'} ]

                ,storeId : 'contactsStore',

getGroupString : function(record) {

        return record.get('lastName')[0];

    }

            });

            var listMain = new Ext.List({

                fullscreen : true,

grouped : true,

indexBar : false,

itemTpl : '<div class="contact2"><strong>{firstName}</strong> {lastName}</div>',

store : 'contactsStore'

            });

        new Ext.Application({

                launch: function() {

                    listMain.show();

                }

            });

I know the javaScript code rendered isn't the prettiest thing in the world, but it is functional. Even if you hate it, this approach could be used for simple scenarios or for rapid prototyping, after which you can take the rendered javaScript and manually clean and move.

I also have this working for the select form control. I eventually want to give some more thought on how to modify the control to better support other store scenarios binding to data sets external to the javaScript code (localStorage, REST, etc).

So far I have working samples that match the Carousel,  Forms, Overlays, Tabs and Tabs2 samples.

Want to work on getting some of the Media controls and map control working and will update. I'm getting close to the point where I need to figure out what to call this library (nTouch?) and where to put it (codeplex, github, etc)

Half the samples I read use Ext.Setup and others use Ext.Application. Saw a few forum answers that said Applications were primarily for MVC applications, but also read that applications had support for targeting profiles.

Right now I have code using the Ext.Application. My current approach is having all server controls inherit from a base class that extends a normal ASP.Net Panel. During pre-Render, I walk the stack and then emit JavaScript in reverse depenency order to declare/configure each object. (generate variables using control ID's as the name), Then in the Applications launch function, call show on the outer most components.

Not sure if this approach makes sense, or I should use Ext.Setup and create a separate Application Control if that is needed.

So far, this is working for Panels. Right now, this snippet:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="ST" Assembly="Sencha.Touch.Core" Namespace="Sencha.Touch.Core" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
    <ST:Panel ID="panelOuter" runat="server" fullScreen="true" style="background-color:Red">
     <ST:Panel ID="panelInner" runat="server" dock="bottom" style="background-color:Blue">
    Hello There
    </ST:Panel>
    </ST:Panel>
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Renders the following:

What I hope to eventually do, is handle layout controls, and then add buttons and other form controls (supporting post backs) and eventually look to support databinding as well, though I'm a ways from that...