SilverlightPulse.NET [Silverlight UK User Group]

Silverlightpulse.net
A micro app for a micro-blogging world
Ian Blackburn
www.bbits.co.uk www.silverlightforbusiness.net

What is Silverlightpulse.net?
Silverlightpulse.net shows and aggregates live tweets about Silverlight
Disclaimer: This isn’t me

What’s it look like?
OK – it needs some designer love!

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

No - What is Twitter really?

Silverlightpulse.net
How quickly and effectively can I create a Silverlight app that shows the Twitter heartbeat for Silverlight ?
Disclaimer: Not me, obviously!

What am I thinking about?

Development Process
Disclaimer: Not me, obviously!

What was in that evenings work?
Took a look at the Twitter Search Api
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Search+API+Documentation
Picked the Json Rest API
Took a look at the Silverlight Toolkit Charts
http://codeplex.com/silverlight
Decided on a simple line chart
Quick architectural choices
No storage (server or ISO) for now
Simple UX – limited choices, if any. No login.
All client based – no server code – because I can!
Do the simplest thing that works and no more
TDD and Unit Tests (oops – fell by the wayside in the rush)
Did “R-TUIT” instead though!
Real-Time UI Testing + lots of refactoring!
Some features didn’t make it
Wordle-like analysis
Map

The Code Section
Lets briefly look at
Using the Twitter Search API
The XAML
Some Value Converters
The Chart
Top Twitterers
Disclaimer: I don’t look like this (I think!)

Using Silverlight with the Twitter Json Search Api

I had to do a bit of work for missing values in the response from Twitter
Used for things like the ToUser value which is often not present in the response

Built a Simple Xaml UI

Some Simple Value Converters

The Chart
Probably the most work
Needed to aggregate the tweets retrieved from the search so they could be displayed
Used a couple of Linq queries and settled on hard-coded 10 minutes grouping

Logic For the Chart

Chart Xaml

Top Twitters – Linq is your friend!
Linq makes these things such a pleasure!

Getting the Top 10 Used Words – Linq again!
This works but I need to remove common words (‘in’, ‘a’, ‘at’ etc) and create some sort of Wordle UI for it

Lessons Learnt
You can do these micro apps quickly and they can have real benefit and impact
Silverlight is great at working with REST API’s
Silverlight is in a great position to take advantage of “the real-time web” and new business models
Linq is fantastic for working with any sort of data
Negatives
Using Google analytics on a Silverlight page doesn’t tell you much!

What next?
Make open source on codeplex if there is anyone interested in helping out
Include missing features
Maps (using new Silverlight VE Map)
Some UX Design
Wordle-like display of popular words
Choose term or hashtag to analyse (not just Silverlight)
Other thoughts? Who wants to help?
This is me with my family!
Disclaimer: Not me