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Opening Day!

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The Major League Baseball season is finally underway!!  This never used to be a major event in my year, but that was before I joined a Fantasy Baseball league last year.  I was hesitant to do so because I was worried about the time commitment.  But I found it to be great fun to pour over baseball statistics like I did when I was a kid.  It re-kindled my interest in baseball and now I’m hooked.

Our season auction was held last Saturday.  It’s an eleven hour event for thirteen owners to ‘buy’ twenty-three players and then draft another six reserves.   Last year, I used Excel to manage my information for the auction (Auto Filter is Excel’s best feature!).  This year, I wanted to get a little more sophisticated in my approach while also doing a little dog fooding of the tools that we develop.

My RotoDrafter application was built on the Microsoft Business Framework (MBF).  (If you read this blog, you know that my team has been refocused on tools for the Microsoft Dynamics and MBF as we knew it is dead , but I was using some bits from last summer).  With the application, I imported into SQL Server five seasons worth of real and projected information for the players in the auction.  Using all this data, I developed and applied a custom rating system for the players.    Finally, I built a UI that would help me manage all of this information at the auction, including notes that I entered before the auction. 

MBF’s model driven approach enabled me to develop the database schema, objects to interface to the data, queries for data access, and the base UI without writing any code.  The code that I did write was for importing the data, rating the players, customizing queries at run-time, and for unit tests with Visual Studio Team System.  It all worked out pretty slick.

RotoDrafter performed well for me at the auction.  But did it help me pick a better team than last year?  I managed to luck out and get second last year, so it will be tough to match.  This year’s team has some good potential, but also has several question marks on the pitching staff where I probably under spent.  Time will tell, but there's always optimism in the spring!

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