Lee Dale

 

A while back I posted about Microsoft Popfly, which is a very cool site from Microsoft that lets you create web pages and web ‘mashups’ without writing a single line of code.

At first Popfly was invitation only but Microsoft have now opened it up to everyone for Beta testing.

I’ve been wanting to play around with Popfly since I first saw a demo on channel9, so I went to the site, logged in and had a simple mashup up and running within minutes.

You can watch the latest Channel9 video on Popfly here to help you get a better understanding of the product. 

When you get into the designer you will notice a toolbox to your left that contains lots of Microsoft and user generated ‘blocks’

Popfly blocks are the foundation of building mashups and you can create your own using javascript, I used two of the pre-built ones to create mine.

I dragged on the Flickr block and entered my API key, what I liked about this was that the block automatically informed me that I need to generate and API key and also gave me a link so I could accomplish that very easily.

I then dragged on the Virutal Earth block and linked the Flickr to it.  I then needed to go into the settings of the Virtual Earth block and wire up the inputs from the Flickr block, in this case it was the latitude and longitude values from my geo-tagged Flickr photos.

I then saved this mashup and run it.

A there you have it, a fully working mashup that was created without writing a single line of javascript. Of course you can build you own blocks and go much further with some very sophisticated mashups and your Popfly projects can also be integrated within Visual Studio.

I think you will agree that this is a very fun and creative tool from Microsoft, I hope it takes off.

On Tuesday I attended the first day of Mix UK 07. Sadly I couldn’t attend the second day due to work commitments but I learned enough about Silverlight from the first day to say it’s was a very informative and useful conference.

All the attendees recieved a free 1GB USB stick which contained a slick Mix Reader application for viewing Mix content.
Scott Guthrie hosted the keynote in which we was shown some fantastic demo applications built on Sliverlight 1.1 Alpha.

George Moore who is General Manager for the Windows Live Platform at Microsoft showed us an AventureWorks application built on top of Windows Live QuickApps Beta.

Sentient showed us their http://www.trackme.com/ application which is currently not live yet. TrackMe is a cool Silverlight and Virtual Earth app that hooks into your Windows Live contacts and allows you to track where your friends are, it sends you a text message when your friends are nearby. A cool concept and a good use of Microsoft technology.

EasyJet presented their new holiday website http://holidays.easyjet.com/. EasyJet have teamed up with First Choice to provide their customers with a complete package holiday experience and have developed this great ASP.Net AJAX website that also makes excellent use of the Virtual Earth API.

TwoFour Digital (http://www.twofourdigital.com/) gave us a lookat their new Silverlight media player created to stream government content.

DotNet Solutions (http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/main/) showed off their cool Scrum wall Silverlight app which is basically an interactive Scrum wall that allows development teams to manage software projects in their browser. The cool thing about this app was that it uses Microsofts Direct Push technology which allowed the changes in one persons browser to be synced into all other browsers.

Finally Sage showed us a cool (if tax returns can be cool) Silverlight online tax return form.

After the keynote I stayed around for Scott’s session’s on building Silverlight 1.1 applications with .Net. These sessions were very useful and definately pointed me in the right direction to start building my own apps.

The slide from Scott’s sessions can be downloaded over at his blog here

So we have all heard about the release of Microsoft Silverlight (formerly WPF/E) but how do you get started using it?

Fortunately Scott Guthrie has released a very good getting started screencast on Silverlight and apart from saying the phrase ‘go ahead’ every minute it’s a very good guide.

So what you waiting for? get over to the Silverlight site and get using it.

Scott Guthrie Getting Started with Silverlight