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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I’ve made simple example with mx.modules, which is adding and removing modules from workspace. There are 3 modules - Weather (in Sofia, Bulgaria), Stock information about Adobe and currency rate - EUR > USD.

Web Services provided by http://webservicex.net

Here is small example on Runtime CSS Loading:

Runtime CSS
Sources

See also:
Flex Help > Loading style sheets at run time
Senocular > Beginners Guide to Getting Started with AS3 (Without Learning Flex) (Check the part about mxmlc.exe compiler).

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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I’ve just revamped my blog :D

• Found new cool theme - Vistered Little
• Painted new cool theme to be more Orange :D
• Edited Flath Text Formater:
• Recompiled it for Flash 8, since this blog is about Flex and NET you should have FP9 by now.
• Added “Copy Code” button to context menu.
• Now FTF resizes nicely in all browsers (there were some issues with FF3\IE7).

Feel free to submit bugs.

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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Sometimes you might want to create different item renderers in a single list-based control i.e. in application form, here is my way of creating it. Basicaly we’ll use single class ItemContainer, but I’ve also created bunch of utility classes which might help me in future. So here they are:

• ItemContainer: This is Canvas subclass. We will create actualItemRenderer in this container. And this container will play as ItemRenderer for List.
• ItemContainerData: This is replacement for data property, it has itemRenderer and data properties, used by ItemContainer.
• InitFactory: ClassFactory subclass, which has one more property - initObject, this is very similar to initObject from ActionScript 2.0 in methods like MovieClip.attachMovie.

The whole idea is to create special ItemRenderer that can “emulate” other controls, in my case it is subclass of Canvas which simply creates a specific UI control adds it to display list . Then we are to let the container know which renderer is to emulate, for this purpose I use ItemContainerData with special fields.

Sources and examples:

Example
Sources
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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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I’ve just created new site - http://search.orangeflash.eu

This is Google - Co-op powered search engine, which able to search through flash resources, I’ve added 64 sites (blogs, forums, sites, mail-lists) so far.

Feel free to contact me and add your resource.

Click here to add more resources.