There is a saying that goes: “There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.”  Two weeks ago I decided I was going to hack away at another practical Silverlight project. Why not re-do the weather? I decided to take a traditional weather report, strip away what doesn’t matter, and emphasize what does:

The temperature is nice and bold, with color indicators if it is getting too hot or too cold. You get the weather report in a English sentence.  (The grammer could use a bit of tweaking, but it get’s the job done.) 

This project allowed me to experiment with two concepts that were new to me: WebClient and LINQ. WebClient allows an application to retrieve a file from the web. In my case it would be an RSS feed coming from Yahoo Weather. LINQ is an extension to the C# language that allows you to query XML files using SQL-like statements. I used it here to parse the RSS feed and pull out the important details like the current temperature, condition code, the highs and lows.

I had a few challenges on the way, but the first (and last) version of Weather Report is shipped. Click on the link below to see it in action. Thank you Jimmy Do for your assistance and patience!

If you notice the weather not loading, just hit F5 to refresh your browser window. That usually solves it…