I’ve talked a lot recently about the work I’ve been doing at EMC Consulting with Fancy Dress Outfitters. We built a new e-commerce web application using ASP.Net MVC and launched it in 10 x 2 week iterations using Scrum project methodology.

In the aftermath of the project’s success, we were really keen to continue to showcase, deep dive, explore and explain the architecture, technologies, tools, decisions etc. that we chose and made along the way. However this is always tricky when working for a consultancy as it’s not possible to just open source the codebase that your client has paid you to build!

We also relied heavily on the use of open source technology and wanted to contribute back to these communities – not just by contributing to indivual projects, but by showing how all these fantastic components can work together.

So, Howard, Jon and myself decided to build a new application using all the goodness that we put into Fancy Dress Outfitters that we could use as a reference going forward, allowing us to be able to talk about this more freely and also to continue to improve and refine it after the original project has reached its conclusion.

I am really proud and happy to announce the launch of Who Can Help Me? – an open source web application, hosted on Codeplex, with a live demo running at who-can-help.me. The application provides a simple, searchable, skills profile matrix, making it easy to find someone with knowledge of a particular technology, training in a particular area, work experience in a particular industry or with a specific client.

The project makes use of the following technologies:

On a personal level, I want to thank Howard and Jon for really pushing this forward. We talked a lot about doing this during the lifecycle of the project but it’s been them that have driven this into real life over the past few weeks. As Lead Developer on the Fancy Dress Outfitters project I went through a massive learning curve with most of these technologies – a lot of them we had never used before – and although I’m immensely proud of what we achieved, it was always at the back of my mind that given the chance to start again, with the cumulative knowledge of 6 months’ learning, we could build something pretty fantastic. Hopefully this goes some way towards acheiving that goal.

So, for now, please take a look at the Codeplex site for more information and to download the source code, play with the live demo at who-can-help.me, shout about it (twitter tag #wchm) and watch this space for more in depth discussion about the project…