Just before I emigrated to Australia, I took on a small contract to build a website for a UK company who wanted to start up a new kind of UK recruitment site, one where employers could advertise directly, and more specifically one where recruitment agencies couldn’t.

The result was Empty Lemon (www.emptylemon.co.uk) – I leave you to figure out why it is called Empty Lemon, took me a fair while to be honest!

This site was built in around 4 weeks, using ASP.NET MVC2, NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate, Windsor, JQuery, Automapper, and a host of other great tools and libraries.

The site is actually, despite the occasional bit of code I’m not too delighted with, a great example of how fast a site can be developed with ASP.NET MVC and the chosen tooling. In just four weeks we went from more or less nothing, to a full domain model (all be it a fairly simple one) running over a SQL Server 2008 database, using a combination of NH, Fulltext search and the Spatial services from SQL Server 2008.

I also want to thank James Gregory, Steve Strong and Hadi Hariri for (sometimes unknowingly) helping me write the site, with useful snippets of code, and even in Steve’s case a lot of work on getting NH to play fair with the spatial services.

So, if you are looking for a job in the UK, or if you are looking to employ someone, I strongly suggest you take a look at www.emptylemon.co.uk. It’s a little empty right now, but some large employers are coming on board soon, and other companies are signing up day by day – these things are always chicken and egg, so if you like the site, feel free to tell others about it – after all, who really likes recruitment agents anyway ;)