Wedding Guest List

The Invitation Collection
Essex, UK

The Wedding Guest List application was developed for The Invitation Collection, a wedding stationery printer. Wedding Guest List is sold as a service to assist printers and their clients, the bride and groom, in the stressful task of creating perfect wedding documents. Wedding Guest List helps organize the invitation process, making it easier for both the couple and printer to complete this task efficiently.

Wedding Guest List is accessed through the client website using secure login.

Printing shops offer the service to their wedding clients to enable them to configure and set up their guest lists, invitations, menus, service orders, RSVPs, and Thank You notes. When clients finalize a section, e.g. invitations, it is locked and the printer receives notification. The printer downloads this section from the website and the invitation list is merged with professional printing software. From here, the appropriate stationery is produced and the client continues updating other sections.

Context and PDF help facility in the Editing Invitations page.

The couple repeats the process for each aspect of their wedding, from guest list to invitation wording. They are free to add and amend the information until it is locked and ready for printing. When the printer gets an email notification, he logs in and downloads the data, which is ready to merge into his printing software to produce the final stationery.

Printers access the Administrative Control Panel to print invitations.

Application size and scope

The Wedding Guest List application accesses one Microsoft SQL Server database, 45 database tables and 18 views, and 250 web pages. The GuestList table is the largest with more than 100 records per client.

The project

It took me two months to complete this project; however, the Iron Speed Designer portion was finished in four weeks.

Code extensions and customizations

I wrote 500 lines of custom code over the course of three weeks.

The major customizations include:

	Customizable email alerts.
	Export functions for each section.
	Custom online help with Telerik popup integration.
	UK postcode lookup integration.

Page layout customizations

I customized the layout with the integration of pop up Help. I also updated the colors and layout slightly.

Telerik controls on the Guest page display help information in the form of a pop up.

Iron Speed Designer impact

I saved four person-weeks and $6,000 using Iron Speed Designer. The project would have taken at least three months to create by hand.

Next steps

While we do not have plans to extend the application, we hope to add many more users in the future.

About the developer

Tim Titchmarsh runs his own software design and consultancy company and has been actively involved in software since 8-inch floppy disks were considered to be the final word in data storage.

"I cut my teeth on Assembler then moved across to C for many years before moving into Visual Basic and SQL Server designing 3-tier client server apps for blue chip clients. I then got involved early on with .NET and C# in a big way and have successfully designed many database driven web applications in finance and insurance for small and large companies based in the UK and Switzerland."

Tim is a member of the Microsoft MSDN Visual Studio Team Developer and The Microsoft Partner Program.