Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'twitter'

Silverlight News on Twitter

Adam Kinney — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:12:00 GMT

For awhile now, I've been tracking interesting Silverlight links and articles using my del.icio.us account. Another Silverlight fanatic Dave Campbell has been tracking worthy links to Silverlight content for awhile as well. His activity morphed from his daily blog posts to its own site named SilverlightCream.com:

This site is simply an aggregation of links and information about Silverlight applications, code, games, tutorials, or resources produced and hosted by others. The "Search" link on the left provides multiple options to search through the stored information.
If you're a developer and want to contribute your links to our database, please select the "Submit" link on the left and follow the instructions on that page.
As material is submitted (and moderated) I will post links and information about them based on submittals to this site.

This is all goodness, but after talking to Dave we've made a few improvements. First step, I'll start posting my links to Silverlight Cream. One data source for the latest and greatest content about Silverlight is a good thing.

Second step, let's figure out a way to make it more consumable. Along with Dave's editorial posts, he's also added integration with Twitter. There is a new Silverlight News account which will be a free flowing list of new links added.

After this we now have a few ways to track Silverlight news:

Subscribe to Dave's Daily Picks RSS which includes his editorial
Subscribe to the Silverlight News on Twitter RSS which is unfiltered view of links
Use the Twitter API to grab the data in JSON format and render it using a nice widget of some sort

Now to go find some of those fancy widgets...

Silverlight Events on Twitter

Adam Kinney — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:53:00 GMT

I subscribe to the internet in general whenever the word "silverlight" is mentioned using a variety of search feeds such as Technorati and Bloglines. This results in a lot of posts, many times duplicate posts, but I also get the chance to find blog entries I would normally miss.

A grouping of those posts that I find interesting include event announcements. In this early stage of Silverlight when there are few experts and many who are just beginning, I think local events where someone is speaking to you directly can be very useful. Documentation is great, but an "in person" chat can be the easiest way to get the zen of a technology.

I started keeping track of these events on the Silverlight wiki on Channel 9. This works fine for storage but is not very discoverable. The rss for the wiki is only updated when a new page is added not when a page is edited.

To aid in discovery, I've decided to create a new twitter account called slevents, where I will post the stream of events as they come in. I will continue to post the events to the wiki page in an ordered by date format. This way we can enjoy the best of both worlds, a stream of new data along with a base reference page. Plus being a twitter account, its more that just an feed its an accessible object via the well-designed Twitter API.

If you want to learn about Silverlight events happening in your area, follow slevents on twitter, subscribe to the feed or add the events page to your bookmarks.

If you want to have your event added to the feed, send a direct message or reply to @slevents on twitter.

Flotzam mashing up Twitter, Facebook and Flickr in WPF

Adam Kinney — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:11:00 GMT

In a recent Channel 9 video, Charles interviews Karsten Januszewski and Tim Aidlin about Flotzam.

Take a spoonful of Twitter, add some Flickr and a dash of Facebook, optionally flavoring to you own taste with custom RSS support and you have an application that doubles as a screensaver flowing data on and off your screen. Better yet, remix the app by grabbing the source code and customize the whole experience.

Kartsen and Tim talk about their development experience especially focusing on the flow of between designer and developer. Tim designed the elements within Blend, handed them off to Karsten who would then write the C# code which reach out and grab the disparate data and display it leveraging Databinding.

Not only is the application mashing-up data, its built on foundation of mashed up code, including libraries such as, Facebook.NET, Flickr.NET and Karsten's own Twitter API built in 4.5 seconds.

Karsten blogged about his experience here, but I would expect to see more from him about the Designer/Developer workflow in the future.