Microsoft Expression Blend in Action - A sample application

This is my first application using Microsoft Expression Blend and Windows Presentation Foundation. This app gets and display Cricket Scores from CricInfo RSS feed.
The User Interface has been entirely developed using Expression Blend and very little code has been written using Visual Studio.net 2005.

Here are the three main features i worked on

1) Connection to XML source and dispalying the data

2) Transparent Window and cool UI elements

3) updating a control's property using DispatcherTimer

Connecting to the xml data source is straight forward in Microsoft Expression Blend. Select XML Source in the Data panel. Add XML data Source Dialog box will appear. Type the URL of the the RSS feed and press OK button. Now create a new grid and a the desired node on to grid.
select the control to be data bounded .

The main application window is made transparent by setting allowtransparancy

AllowTransparancy = true;

This will also hide the menubar and then the window could not be moved.

How to solve this problem

Select Window in Object and TimeLine Panel and then select events in the properties panel.
Now type OnMouseLeftButtonDown at MouseButtonDown and press Enter key.
This will load the project in Microsoft Visual Studio.net 2005 and the OnMouseLeftButtonDown event will be automatically added .

Here's the code to fix this so you can move the window.

override void OnMouseLeftButtonDown(MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
DragMove();
}

Updating UI controls property uisng DispatcherTimer

I thought that it would look nice if we could display the time when the score card information was last updated. Its wasy to guess that this task requries a Timer object.

Windows Presentation Foundation comes with DispatcherTimer Class. This is a timer that is integrated into the Dispatcher queue which is processed at a specified interval of time and at a specified priority.

Reasons for using a DispatcherTimer opposed to a System.Timers.Timer are that the DispatcherTimer runs on the same thread as the Dispatcher and a DispatcherPriority can be set on the DispatcherTimer.

dispatcherTimer = new DispatcherTimer();
// Score should be updated every 30 seconds -:)
dispatcherTimer.Interval = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 30);
dispatcherTimer.Tick += new EventHandler(dispatcherTimer_Tick);
dispatcherTimer.Start();

After developing this app, i must say WPF and Expression Blend rocks!

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for Vista is officially released

Tim Sneath reported that the final release of the Visual Studio 2005 update for Windows Vista is now available. This update fixes most of the issues that you may have faced with running Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista. Install Visual Studio 2005, the Service Pack 1 update, and then the Windows Vista update to get a fully-supported developer environment.
There's also an interesting interview with Soma (the VP responsible for the Developer Division here) on Microsoft Presspass. The questions are a little soft (the interview is posted on our press relations site, after all!) but it's a good review of where the developer platform is today and the focus areas for the developer tools and platform part of the business.

New tutorial site for newbies and kids by microsoft

Microsoft Corporation unveiled a new tutorial website yesterday. It is to help people with no programming experience learn to build Windows applications or Web sites using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 .
The new Beginning Developer Learning Center offers such developers 45 lessons and 31 short “how-to” videos on programming using Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition products, Microsoft said.

It starts with the very basics, and guides you through step-by-step to becoming a fully-fledged developer.It is suitable for students that have no prior knowledge of programming.
All lessons in the Beginner Developer Learning Center are organized into two development tracks (Windows Development and Web Development). They are further classified into Tiers or levels of difficulty.
To view all the lesson available, click on Learning Path.

Since last 2-3 years Microsoft has been providing tools and services for students and non-developers.

Adding a Proxy server to your code can never be so easy !

Today i have created a small console program which uses multiple proxy servers to fetch data from www.google.com.

HttpWebRequest.Proxy Property is used to specify the proxy server through which the rquest is posted.




download source code: http://www.divshare.com/download/188899-47e

Posting to a webpage and using it's response

HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse - here are the two classes to simulate the web browser funtionality in smart client applications.
We can use the following method when we had to call a web page which return the result as Xml.

public static string GetHttpRequest(StringBuilder data, string sourcePath)
{
Stream aStream = null;
try
{
//Send POST request web page
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(sourcePath);
req.Method = "POST";
// Content type is xml
req.ContentType = "text/xml";
req.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
if (data.Length > 0)
{
req.ContentLength = data.Length;
StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(req.GetRequestStream());
sw.Write(data.ToString());
sw.Flush();
sw.Close();
}
// Create The Response Object And Fill It By Sending The Request;
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
aStream = response.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(aStream);
StringBuilder sbOutput = new StringBuilder();
char[] buffer = new char[1024];
int r;
while ((r = sr.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
sbOutput.Append(buffer, 0, r);
return sbOutput.ToString();
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
//TODO: handle exception
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//TODO: handle exception
}
finally
{
aStream.Close();
}
return string.Empty;
}

web automation - Fetch / Send HTTP Post data to a Web Server

Since last two days i am googling for how to fetch and post data on websites using the standard .net aplication.
Such applications will be helpful in many scenarios . Examples of application using the above technique
1) Website Testing
2) Website Downloader
3) Stress testing of Server and Websites
4) Data pulling from websites - like fetching usage data from BSNL Data One server -:)