EnerMeter

Orly and I downloaded Slide.Show 2, opened the project with Visual Studio 2010, and all the samples worked great.

One of the options for selecting the photos to be displayed is to provide an XML file listing each photo together with a description. This works very well, but has the disadvantage that the XML file has to be prepared in advance, and it is not that simple to choose between files. Orly had previously written a Handler that creates an XML document containing all of the photos in a directory tree, and used that to replace the static XML file for the original Slide.Show, and we spliced this Handler into the samples and everything worked as expected. Enough with the sample application, now it is time to make a clean version that we can deploy.

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I have previously blogged about how to use Silverlight 2.0 Beta to create a FeaturePics API demo.

FeaturePics API Demo - Part 1
FeaturePics API Demo - Part 2

On 10/14 Silverlight 2.0 was released with various breaking changes from the Beta as documented on this Silverlight Blog.

As you know from FeaturePics API Demo - Part 1, this demo was a modification of Scott Guthrie's eight part tutorial Silverlight 2 End to End Tutorial: Building a Digg Search Client, which has also been updated to Silverlight 2.0. My update has once again followed Scott's lead in that he replaced the discontinued  WatermarkTextBox Control with a simple TextBox control, and I have done the same. This caused the helpful disappearing text in the TextBox to no longer appear, which is the only obvious change.

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I did a couple of posts about creating a Silverlight demo of the FeaturePics API.

The final sample is at : http://enermeter.com/fpDemo/apidemo.html.

Reports soon came in that the page would not run on either Safari nor FireFox on the MAC. So I put the same control on a page with less HTML and CSS, and I have been told that it works this way. Go figure. But hey, I am sure people who prepare pages for the MAC can work out how to embed this control on their page if they are so inclined. Here is the simplified version: http://enermeter.com/fpDemo/apidemo-MAC.html

FeaturePics has released an api (application programming interface) that allows images on the FeaturePics web site to be used on your web site. There are various api options available that you can see described at http://www.featurepics.com/API/Search.aspx. I was aware of the api, but had not seen it in action. < /p>

I have also been hearing a lot about Microsoft Silverlight that is in the second beta release, but really knew nothing about it. Reports have  it that it will work on any browser and has only about a 4k download to install on the client computer, and the download only needs to be installed once,  the first time a Silverlight app is run. So when I found a small tutorial demonstrating how to use Silverlight in a client application, I decided to take the plunge. < /p>

The tutorial was pretty straightforward and the result was impressive. No problem at all until I tried to run the code and it did not work. It turned out to be a difference between beta 1 and beta 2. I wrote a blog post about how to resolve that issue. < /p>

http://enermeter.com/post/2008/08/16/Simple-Silverlight-2-app-APIDemo-Part-1-Building-the-DiggSample.aspx < /p>

While working out the Digg example in the tutorial I thought it might be modified a bit to show how the recently released FeaturePics api could be used in a web application. I made the changes and wrote a second blog post about doing so, including the source code I used to make the application. < /p>

http://enermeter.com/post/2008/08/28/Simple-Silverlight-2-app-APIDemo-Part-2-Building-the-FeaturePics-API-Demo.aspx < /p>

If you are not a programmer and have little or no interest in this type of technology, you might still be interested to see the page as it turned out. It allows you to search all of the FeaturePics images by keyword, and returns a set of thirty image thumbnails that result. Please note that the set of thumbs in my demo can range from zero to thirty, while the actual number at FeaturPics may be much greater than thirty. When you click on one of them you get a brief summary of the image and a link back to FeaturePics. < /p>

You can see the completed demo application here: http://enermeter.com/fpDemo/apidemo.html. < /p>