Rick URL Shortening Service – an ASP.net MVC learning project

All right, I said I wanted to start learning ASP.net MVC, and I did make some progress 🙂 A few weeks ago, I was talking about creating a project called Écriture, a Twitter clone that companies can deploy internally. That project is still in the plans, and when I was creating the "Wishlist" (Or Product Backlog, as the SCRUM guys like to call it) for Écriture, eventually I realized that I wanted a URL Shortening service as well, since in many corporate intranets, URLs can be really long, and using tinyurl, is.gd and all the other services have some confidentiality concerns (hint: Using tinyurl to shorten "company.internal/documents/marketing/unaccouncedproduct.htm" is possibly not very smart).

I wanted to kill three birds with one stone, so I decided to make this a standalone project. The three birds are 1. the actual URL shortening Service, 2. a project where I can play with all the newest technologies, 3. a project that allows me to create some tutorial videos.

The name of the Project is "Rick", and it's source code is hosted on CodePlex, at http://www.codeplex.com/rick

Version 01 was just released, and it actually fully works already: You can put in a long URL, get a short URL back, put that short URL in a browser, and get redirected to the original URL. And the best of all: I have created a Tutorial video for that, which you can watch online or download (download requires free registration with Vimeo). Granted, Version 01 is ugly, has no error handling and lacks a lot of features, but I am actually going to improve it over the next few weeks, making it more robust and I also plan to add more technologies to it, for example Windows Azure or Silverlight.

For your convenience, here is the video:


Rick Version 01 - Building a URL Shortening Service in ASP.net MVC from Michael Stum on Vimeo.

Please let me know what you think and what you would like to see in the future.

Comments (3)

[...] I’ve made the very first version of Rick, a URL Shortening Service in ASP.net MVC, and today I’ve made the first [...]

YOUR-TITLEAugust 24th, 2009 at 12:45

Not Rocket Science » Rick URL Shortening Service – an ASP.net MVC learning project...

Thank you for submitting this cool story - Trackback from YOUR-TITLE...