OrangeFlash

In the previous tutorial we’ve created very small Web Service, which provides us with news, images and weather. Now we will create client to our Web Service in Microsoft Blend

So lets start Blend and C# Express, and create new project called “MiniRIA”, and lets start to develop!

But before we’ll actualy start to develop, we need WebService proxy class that call remote operations on our server. We’ll do this same way we did with GlobalWeather service:

• Start your WebService from Visual Web Developer, and remmember it’s url, you can check in the Task Bar.
• Open Command Promt, and type: wsdl.exe HERE_IS_URL /out:Path\to\project\Service.cs

Now let’s think a bit (yeah we have to do this stuff sometimes), since I’m using Windows Vista I really miss old Windows XP window layout, do you remmember blue panel with expanding toolboxes on your left, and content of a folder on your right? We’ll do similar layout in our application. On left side we’ll place weather and media information, and news on right. So we have to create 3 main UI Controls:

• Weather control - holds information about weather.
• News control - with propaganda :D.
• Flickr control - with images.

Weather control will hold some Labels and TextBoxes controls, News and Flickr will contain ListBox instance, which will be filled with content (images for Flickr and news for News).
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This is first tutorial in a series of “Creating NanoRIA”, in these tutoriales we will discuss creation of Web Service and small range of client. Today we’ll talk about server-side, than in the next tutorials we’ll create WPF client, Flex and Flash Lite clients, so potential end-users will be able to run our app on: Windows, Mac OS, Brew, SymbianOS and WindowsMobile.

Introduction

Lets pretend that we work for some company, and they want widely accessible application (Macs, Windows, Mobile devices etc.) which will let users to get access to news, some media data (photos), and weather information. Of course we won’t create that big stuff, we’ll emulate these functions, we will read news from EuroNews.net and BBC.com, then we pull some images from Flickr.com and weather from webservicex.net, but we still can pretend ;).

For this tutorial you’ll need:

• RSS.NET framework for parsing RSS feeds.
• FlickrNET framework for working with Flickr.com.
• Microsoft WebDeveloper Express for developing and testing our work.
• Web Services (similar tutorial with some info can be found in this blog .NET+Flex).
• And some knowledge of C# (you can read this and this entries in my blog or review documentation of WebDeveloper).
• And Flickr.com developer API key, which you can get after registration via your profile

Planning

Ok so we’ve agreed that we pretend that we own Flickr, BBC and Euronews (cool isn’t it? :D), lets see what we have.

We have:

• BBC World RSS feed
• EuroNews RSS feed
• Bunch of Flickr methods (but we will use only one)
• And WebServiceX.net WebService which provides us with thcurrent weather.

Quite nice, so we have to make these data avaliable in appropriate form for users, for news I suggest that we gather em all in one place, and than sort them by date, and since downloading a lot of news could be a problem for mobile users, we have to define two ways of getting news: for desktop computers and for mobile users. Then we will pass bunch of links to flickr photos, and information about current weather.

In order to do this, we will create a series of Value Objects (also known as DTO), which will be sent by our server to client.

Our Web Service will have 4 methods:

• GetNews - Retrieving latest news.
• GetNewsLite - Same but for mobiles.
• GetPhotos - Photos from flickr
• GetWeather - Weather.

Let’s start.
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Previous parts:

• Blend For ActionScript Coders #1: MouseEvents.
• Blend For ActionScript Coders #2: List Controls.

I think we are quite ready for our first application in Blend, that is RSS Reader, we also “meet” closer with XAML today.

Idea

Ok, our current RSS reader should be really simple, since this is our first time with layout in Blend. I say, we need one TextBox (something like TextInput\TextArea in Flex), one Button, and ListBox which will hold data from RSS feed. We Also have to create some custom class which will present every feed item in appropriate form, but this is another story.
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Previous part.

This is second tutorial about Microsoft Blend, I strongly recommend you to read previous part of this tutorial, you may find some basic information about editing code, basis of C# syntax and some links.

In this tutorial we will learn how to use list based controls in .Net and also how to load an images in System.Windows.Controls.Image control. Lets create new project called “List” in Blend and open in your C# IDE.
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I was playing with Microsoft Blend (previously known as Interactive Designer) for a while, and now I think I’m ready to write short tutorial. Since I’m basicaly ActionScript coder this article will contain some migration tips and comparisons with Flex\ActionScript.

For this tutorial you will need:

• Microsoft Expression Blend Beta 1
• .Net 3.0 Framework
• Some C# IDE ( C# Express for example which I’m using in this tutorial)

In this tutorial we will learn how to work with mouse events in blend
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Well, to be honest this is not competely truth, we cannot write in ActionSctipt for .NET 3.0, but we can write in JScript which is subtype of JavaScript 2.0, which is ECMA4… well this is just like ActionScript 3.0 ;). The only one seriouse difference is classes and their location, but we still have ByteArray, BitmapData\Bitmap and ColorMatrix (which is ColorMatrixFilter in AS) and bunch of other similar classes.

Now, .NET 3.0 is compatable with version 1 and 2, so that means that we can compile library for .NET 2 and use it in our WPF/E-.NET 3.0 project.

For this mini tutorial you’ll need .NET 3.0 and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer.
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For this tutorial you will need:

Adobe Flex Builder
Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express

Also need to know what is WSDL, SOAP (you can read about them at http://www.wikipedia.org).

Part I: Creating of the Web Service in Visual Web Developer Express

To be honest I love this programm, this programm designed especialy for lazy guys like me, we dont need to install, setup, download different parts and plugins, register or do other actions to test your projects. This programm will do everything for you :D. This is just the right thing we need for my newbie level of WebService developing.

We will create service which should give us rates for the Adobi, Applo and Mecrosoft shares (we will generate them of course). For this purpose we will create OrangeStocks class, which will be WebService itself, and StockData class, which should “collect” data about rates.
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