Xbox Friends Watch - releasing v1 of the new Gamercard

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Xaps

One of my favorite new features of Silverlight 2 is the new Application model.  Moving on from version 1.0, where JavaScript instantiation was the only way to start your app and you were restricted to the same origin as the web page, enter the Xap.  The new packaging model, not only bundles your assets into one file enabling simpler deployment, it also enables application instantiation via the object tag.  Plus, the Xap can live on a separate server than the web page, which enables the creation of embeddable applications with Silverlight.

<applause!>

- More information about Xaps and the new Application Model

Xbox Friends Watch Gamercard

In celebration of this functionality, I've expanded on the Xbox Friends Watch line and added a new Gamercard.  Xbox.com currently offers a gamercard which renders a fairly static set of html and images which is embedded via an iframe.  Using Silverlight for its interactivity, data stack and portability and the Xbox Gamertag Data Service I thought I would be able to enhance the experience as well as expose the status information provided by the Data Service.

Below is the result of my experiment and using the Gamercard page you can create a script to add the Gamercard to your site.

Get Microsoft Silverlight

- Add the Gamercard to your page

Next Steps

My next post will include some of the technical details covering how the Gamercard was created and some of the techniques I used to work with Silverlight 2.

If you're interested in following the saga of the Xbox Friends Watch components you can subscribe to my XBF feed, follow XBF on Twitter or follow XBF on Facebook.

posted on Apr 2nd, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)

5 Comments »

  1. Cool! Why do I still see the "click to activate control" tooltip though?

    Comment by Scott Hanselman - April 03, 2008 @ 12:23 AM

  2. Yeah, that's annoying. The funny thing is that Flash has moved away from OBJECT tags in favor of the swfobject.js library in order to avoid the Click To Activate annoyance, and here Silverlight is moving from JS to OBJECT which is going to run straight into that buzzsaw unless they come up with a way around it. Damn EOLAS.

    Comment by Steven Smith - April 03, 2008 @ 7:31 AM

  3. The patch is available to remove it for IE 6 & 7, and will hopefully be part of an update for IE soon.

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945007

    Comment by Adam Kinney - April 03, 2008 @ 8:16 AM

  4. Thanks for this Adam. I've added my Gamercard to my blog. I can't wait to see how you made this.

    Comment by Alvin Ashcraft - April 04, 2008 @ 7:14 AM

  5. Hi Adam. You talked about Gamercard and showed some interesting LINQ code for it at the PDX Webfoot event last Saturday. I would like to take a closer look. Could you blog about how you impemented it and maybe make the code available? Thanks.

    Comment by Marc Schluper - April 14, 2008 @ 10:22 PM

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