Zune Social on Silverlight (v1)

[Krebo]

For about as long as Zune Social's been around (one year), I've been wondering why Microsoft only shows their Zune Card using Adobe Flash, considering they're working hard to push Silverlight (the "Flash killer") elsewhere on the web. I thought the technology looked cool, and I decided to test it out.

So after slowly gathering the pieces and information I needed to put together a version of the Zune Card on Silverlight, I have this: a rudimentary yet working Silverlight application. I'm working on implementing some of the features we've come to know and love on the official page, and if anyone has any info (like how Storyboards work, how to choose an Element based on attributes, or just general coding help) I would greatly appreciate it.

Here's how it's looking so far.


You can download the source from Send big files the easy way. Files too large for email attachments? No problem!. Remember that you have to run it from a web service (you can't just run the html). To do this, build it in Visual Studio or Expression Blend.

Thanks!
-Adam Krebs (Adam at ZuneThoughts.com)

[Jorvette]

Cool!

[Netrix]

That looks pretty good. If I had more time, I would learn how to develop with Silverlight.

[Krebo]

That looks pretty good. If I had more time, I would learn how to develop with Silverlight.

It's actually pretty simple. It's just a combination of C# and XAML, which are both comparatively easy to learn (this is my first project with either).

[Charge]

Very nice!

[Krebo]

I've uploaded a version to Live. Let me know if there are any issues:

zCard_silverLight

[RoguePlanetoid]

Pretty clever I wanted to implement something like this similar to my ZuneCardr product but no one was interested in that - thought about using LINQ myself for that too - but well done for getting a Silverlight app running - how did you solve the XSS problem with regards to loading content from another domain in a silverlight app e.g. calling zune.net objects say from zuneboards.com via Silverlight - I could never get this to work myself? Great work anyway!

[Krebo]

Rogue: Thanks for the props! I thought I was going to lose my head when I couldn't figure out the XSS domain problem (Silverlight's got some pretty stringent security measures). Check out this MSDN article on cross-site data in Silverlight. I load the XElement data through a Stream, which is created using WebClient. It's all there in the source code if you want to take a look.

The XLINQ stuff comes from a Silverlight/Expression dev who created a simple C# app to download it all. I'm sorta new to this stuff, so everything is pretty poorly hacked together. If you can offer any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it.

Also: I'm having difficulty running the app from the Live hosting. Is it working for anyone else? Thanks!