Google Picasa Desktop Application

Google Picasa Desktop Application

Recently I have been developing a small windows application which interacts with the Picasa Web Albums Data API. Development has been in the C# programming language using Windows Forms as the GUI. The application allows a user to view/upload/download and search for public photos from the Google Picasa Web-service all from their desktop.

What is the Google API?

As most of the applications that I have developed have consisted of interacting with Google’s web-services via their API, I thought I would describe what underlying protocol the Google API is based on. Hopefully this post will try to explain this.

MCTS: Windows Applications .NET 2.0

Currently in the middle of the MCTS: Windows Applications .NET 2.0 course. As I have virtually no commercial programming experience – which employers are looking for in a candidate. Yes I have the knowledge to develop software in my free time (please see the projects that I have done), and above all enjoy programming this is however not enough.

Selected projects hosted on Google Code

Check out my Google Code project for the previously documented Microsoft Silverlight Bing Search application.

The source code hosted on Google Code can be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/silverlight-bing-search-application/

Update

Just uploaded the WPF Google Docs Uploader / Exporter project, check it out at:

http://code.google.com/p/wpf-google-docs-up-down/

Update

Just uploaded the Windows Forms Google Picasa client, check it out at:

http://code.google.com/p/googlepicasaclient/

Update

WPF Google Docs Application

I have been developing a WPF application which allows a user to view/export and upload documents into their Google Docs account. Using the Google Docs .NET SDK, I was able to develop a WPF application from scratch. After the jump some code snippets and screen-shots of the application.

jQuery for absolute beginners

I came across some jQuery video tutorials which explain how to use it very clearly from a beginners perspective. The tutorials are split up over around 15 days, so you don’t feel overwhelmed with using jQuery.

A big thanks goes to Jeffrey Way from ThemeForest.net, for creating an excellent set of tutorials.

Below are the links to the individual tutorials:

jQuery Topic	Snippet	Tutorial-link
Day 1: Downloading the library	Where to download jQuery from…	Link
Day 2: Fade, Slide, and Show Methods	Looks at the “fadeIn”, “slideDown”, and “show” methods, and jQuery’s “css” abilities	Link
Day 3: The Animate Method	Learn how to shift any element across the screens	Link
Day 4: Advanced Selectors	How to individually select an item and also using X-Path	Link
Day 5: Creating and Removing Elements	How to dynamically create and remove elements	Link
Day 6: The toggle() and toggleClass() Methods	Turn “off and on” elements or classes	Link
Day 7: The hover() Methods	When a user mouses on and off the elements in a wrapped set	Link
Day 8: User Request – Image Slides.	Image manipulation	Link
Day 9: Resizing Text.	How to resize text every time an associated anchor tag is clicked	Link
Day 10: Intro to AJAX: Using the Load Method.	Store information on one page, and then load that specific information from another page	Link
Day 11: Fun Image Hovering.	Image pop-up on mouse hover	Link
Day 12: Advanced Tooltips: Part 1.	Drawing information from a database to create an advanced tooltip + PHP	Link
Day 13: Submitting Information to a Database Asynchronously.	Submit information to a database asynchronously – using PHP and jQuery	Link
Day 14: Implementing Your First Plugin	Implement a jQuery plugin into your applications: s3Slider plugin	Link
Day 15: Building a jQuery Style-Switcher: Part 1	Creating a jQuery style-switcher that will allow the user to switch between CSS files	Link
Day 15: Building a jQuery Style-Switcher: Part 2	PHP side of a CSS style-switcher	Link

Other screen-casts by Jeffrey Way.

A Silverlight Bing API Web Application: Server side (Part 2)

This is part 2 of the A Silverlight Bing API Web Application walk-through. After the jump some Silverlight information, server side code and screen-shots of the application.

A Silverlight Bing API Web Application: Working with JSON (Part 1)

Today I have been developing a Silverlight Rich Internet application which utilizes the Microsoft Bing API. To be honest I have never used Silverlight to develop an application before (typically web applications: ASP.net and desktop client applications: Win-Forms). After viewing some of the Silverlight video tutorials I decided to dive straight into development. After viewing some of Microsoft Bing if you haven’t heard of it is Microsoft’s search engine site, in many ways similar to Google.

This is part 1 of a 2 part post about developing a Silverlight application using the Bing API.

Please see this post to see screen-shots and server side code needed to implement this small application.

More info after the jump, including JSON and API usage.

Cross-thread operation not valid

As I’ve been doing a lot of programming with win-forms, c# and c++ and making my applications multi-threaded – I came across a problem of allowing a newly created thread change the UI. I wanted to move away from using the BackgroundWorker class. Below I will discuss how to do this in c#.

Multi-threaded architecture

As I am looking to add elements of multi-threaded features to the RSS reader that I am developing, I have been researching into multi-threaded architectures and basically what concurrency is. After the jump I will explain in detail what multi-threaded is and how they can be incorporated into an application, and I hope if your a beginner like me when it comes to multi-threading, you will understand it better afterwards too.