ryan panchadsaram » Projects

Silverlight: What’s the Weather?

Ryan — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 23:12:45 +0000

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…

Silverlight Top Stories

Ryan — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:16:53 +0000

What’s next? After experimenting with the Human Clock in Silverlight I wanted to try something new. This challenge was to create a prototype for a module that shows off top stories from an RSS feed.

I wanted to experiment with the animation, glow effects and positioning of elements within a project. All the text and images are Silverlight controls that can be programatically updated. This is a prototype, so you won’t see RSS integration complete yet. The same content about New England snow cuts power will appear over and over again.

Next Step: Find a developer to write up the C# code to load an RSS feed and parse it. Or…I can tinker and try to do it myself!

A Humanized Clock

Ryan — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:12:34 +0000

On my flight back from Seattle I started sketching my first idea for a Silverlight project. I had two objectives. The first was to test out the new C# and Silverlight goodness I learned on Friday and the second was to make the project somewhat useful. So I decided I would make a clock.

This clock doesn’t represent time using dials or numbers, it conveys it through words and blocks. Instead of showing time as 3:45 and 11:58, it is ”a quarter past three“ and “almost twelve“. Just like the way we talk. It is human time.

There are also blocks that light up to represent the hours and minutes of the day. The 24 blocks on the left are hours and the 60 smaller ones on the right are minutes.

Please tell me what you think and also leave suggestion on how to make this clock even better. I will write another post later this week which will include the source code for the project.

This clock was made in Silverlight a Microsoft technology that enables rich interactive experiences online. It is like Flash, but re-architected from the ground up. Remember the Olympics…that was streamed online using Silverlight. If you are a developer, I encourage you to check out Silverlight.net to learn more about creating your own projects.