There's a time and a place for hackathon-style coding.

But I find that I take a similar approach to Chen. Maybe not quite so rigorous.

- Start with a console app (actually I always keep a console app in the solution for isolating bits of code I want to debug)

- Scaffold the part where said code needs to go

- Once the code from step 1 is ready, stick it in the scaffold and debug until it looks good

- Work on further tests (load test, code coverage, variety of inputs)