Well, it's been a few months now but I think things are running pretty smoothly for the new version of Gaming Nexus. A complete graphical redesign was done thanks to Kolby getting us a designer to hash out some comps. With that, I decided to move away from the open source persistence framework, Gentle.NET, into using LINQ for the database interactions. I'm still using Gentle.NET in the admin side of things until I create a brand new admin but eveything on the Gaming Nexus public side is being handled by LINQ. I must say it was pretty easy to get everything up and running in terms of retrieving the data that I needed. I did separate the data layer out so that if I want to change from LINQ to something else, I would replace the data layer and do some minor massaging of the front end to get it all working. So far I'm very happy with the performance and how well it's holding up.

The site uses master pages and CSS to do all the formatting. If you browse the site with a mobile phone, I programmatically throw up a different master page that contains different formatting along with a different CSS file to format the text to a more mobile friendly view. I can even create different themes and let users select the one they want to see. I think it came out quite well and makes it so I can change the entire look of the site without having to do as much work.

Overall, I really enjoyed redoing the site using Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ. I'm going to add some more features as the year progresses but I'm very pleased with what Visual Studio 200, .NET 3.5, and LINQ has to offer.