Silverlight Version?

[reven]

i was just doing some research on silverlight 3, its moving along really well.

And i figured silverlight 3 would be a really good platform for a "Enhanced Enhanced Web Admin"

You can now install a silverlight app to the desktop (pc or mac) and use it like a normal app.

im not suggesting a rewrite/convert, just thats its a cool platform and wondering what people think about this?

I may give it a little go, just to get my feet wet in silverlight 3.

[observer_11]

If you want to try developing a web based app I would suggest you go with Flash/FlexBuilder, especially since 99% of end users already have the runtime client installed.

I remember reading not long ago one of the major news network websites using Silverlight to provide Olympic games coverage and they found too many users were turning away from the site when they immediately encountered the 'you must download and install MS Silverlight' message. Microsoft is desperately trying to play catch-up with the Flash platform (AIR, Flex, Flashlite,etc) and comparing them is like comparing Google search and Live search. Microsoft have a long road ahead if they want to catch and really compete with Flash, IMHO.

There are numerous other advantages for Flash over Silverlight for RIA development but I don't want to come off as an Adobe fanboy - suffice to say you can google the pros/cons for yourself. In my opinion the biggest negative with Adobe Flash is the development tools are so expensive, save the Flex SDK. I think Flexbuilder is free for students, and Adobe have free 60 day trials, but still their prices are outrageous IMO.

[reven]

im not going down the flex vs silverlight road.

simple fact is that gbpvr is written in .net, silverlight is .net. I believe whole heartily that silverlight is a excellent platform to develop with. it has the power of .net (which is far superior to flash/air) and can be developed with the best (by leaps and bounds) IDE out there (visual studio).

i dont want to turn this into a debate over which platform should be used.

i rather want to have a discussion about a EWA written in silverlight and what benefits that would bring. With silverlights video capabilities and now h264 support we might be able to stream video from with the app.

and basically im just looking for a project to learn silverlight more, i have no interest in learning flash/flex/air/whatever. if someone else wants to do that, thats wonderful, i wish you all the best.

[psycik]

reven, saw a site the other day, that was back issues of magazines, then click on magazine and you could read it, was all done in silverlight.

Sort of reminded me of a web based cover flow. May lend it self to EWA for browsing...

I agree that it could be interesting to develop a silverlight version, and agree with you DotNet + DotNet just makes sense.

[reven]

psycik, check out the silverlight 3 beta, at http://www.silverlight.net,

i just love the ability you can right click (or have an "install" button in the app) and it gets installed to your start menu/desktop on windows and (i assume) to your desktop /applications on a mac.

having a more powerful tool that can use webservice calls that can do everything with little to no postbacks (eg you wouldnt need a postback (partial or full) to view your entire tv guide, only call a webservice to actually set up a recording) is very appealing.

and i have a imac in my lounge with the tv, and being able to schedule recordings on that and managing my video library in a rich interface, well its too cool of an idea not to do some investigating on it.

and plus with the webservice calls setup for a silverlight app, the same webservice calls could be used for an iPhone (and then we're really talking).

[UncleJohnsBand]

Sounds intriguing but I am sure it is much more complicated than it sounds.

There really is not much to the EWA display pages themselves....its main parts are the displaying of information provided via the GBPVR API (this is by design).

When interacting with the API you are dealing with native GBPVR objects for the Programmes and Schedules.

It wouldn't be hard to expose some of the functionality that EWA has created to schedule/delete programmes. They would just be method calls that would be processed by the web server via a web service.

The more complicated things come into play when you want to display information.

For example....the guide. You make a call to the API requesting a Schedule object that contains the schedules between abc date and xyz date.

The API returns a Schedule object that contains all the programmes that fall into that date range.

You then parse through the Schedule object pulling out each Programme object.

The Programme object has pertinent info about the programme (channel, times, status, etc).

Next is the hard part.....you need to display this information to the user.

This means you need to come up with a display mechanism/format that you want to use. In the case of EWA it was the Guide and the Format was to build a grid using tables (guide.aspx) or CSS based display (guide2.aspx). The same holds true for the Manage and Search areas of EWA.

This requires an engine to process the Schedule and Programme objects and dynamically creating the rows and columns, formatting tags, icons, search links (imdb, tv.com, etc) that when done parsing through the schedule is then simply streamed to the browser as an HTML document.

For SilverLight (never coded anything in it or know much about it) this formatting proces would need to either A- Continue to occur on the server side and be fed to the application or B- be built into the application itself which would require the application to carry the GBPVR class objects with it so it could interact with the native objects or C - The server would create XML based versions of the data objects wich the application would parse through and format into whatever was laid out to display.

Given that HTML (tables or CSS) provides the ability to create the necessary varying time blocks for programmes in the guide (i.e. one channel may have everythng starting on the 1/2 or hour marks while the next channel may have everyting starting on 15 minute intervals or something even less standard) what would the display format/mechanism be in SilverLight (again....I have know idea about what SilverLight can offer here)?

[reven]

i think you think its more complicated than it really is.

basically for the tv guide you would make a webservice call and retrieve all the tv guide info (or like a week of it - and probably best if its a xml formatted data, instead of a serialized object just to save bandwidth) and then everything will be rendered on the client side via silverlight, the render wont be hard at all, infact its dead simple.
then you can just scroll the tv guide and no need to do a postback to the server for the next page, it will just be a continued list (like the native tv guide in gbpvr).

to get the bare bones of the EWA in silverlight shouldnt take that much work. you could probably have the tv guide and scheduling done in a matter of days. the majority of the work would be making it pretty. everything else is simple

[UncleJohnsBand]

Anyone up for taking a stab at creating a guide in SilverLigth from an XML doc?

Attached is a XML document I created via a web service I put together within EWA. The service takes in the parameters that the web based guide does....start date/time, end date/time and a genre filter.

I simply created an XML document that contains the information from the request(webServiceGuide).

There is the main document which contains the guide listing results(webServiceGuideListing).

The results consist of channels 9WebServiceGuideChannel) which in turn hold programmes. The channels consit of a channel number and name.

The programmes (webServiceGuideProgramme) that are listed within each channel hold all the publicly available info for the the programme object.

Attached is a document from my setup.....about 12 channels total for a 3 hour period.

[reven]

ill start making a silverlight version in the next few days and put in into the open source 'gbpvr library'.

ive used silverlight since 1.1 beta, so im fairly comfortable with it (just havent had the chance to play with v3 yet)

[UncleJohnsBand]

ill start making a silverlight version in the next few days and put in into the open source 'gbpvr library'.

ive used silverlight since 1.1 beta, so im fairly comfortable with it (just havent had the chance to play with v3 yet)

Sounds good....I do need to add one more element to the Programme for status so it is denoted as available or recording, recorded, failed or in conflict.

EDIT:

Added updated XML file that covers 1.5 days and includes recorded programmes as well as pending programmes. Programme info now includes some Object Id's (OID) which will be useful for other operations.