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.

C++ Audio player

As mentioned earlier I am currently developing an RSS win-forms application. One functionality that I recently have been working on consists of having podcast playback, in essence MP3 audio playback.

After the jump you will see a couple of screen-shots, showing the audio player both in design mode and in deployment mode, as well the library called libwmp3 that I have used to achieve the audio playback.

C++ win-forms feed reader application

I have started to develop a win-forms based Visual C++ web feed reader application. The application basically extends the idea of the web based Ajax application I created for my Masters dissertation. I enjoyed developing the web application so much that I thought it would be interesting to develop one in the win-forms environment.

As usual more information can be found after the jump..

Connecting a C++ application to a SQL database

Connecting to a SQL server database with either C# or VB is a straightforward process. However, the support for C++ is relatively very poor. In this post I will provide a walk-through to outline the steps necessary to interact with a SQL database using C++.

Requesting a file using C#, ASP.net and the Microsoft Ajax Toolkit

In this post I will describe how to request a small text file from the server and display its content inside a ASPX page, using server side logic along with the Microsoft Ajax toolkit to provide a more interactive experience for the user. Please see my earlier post on the toolkit for more information.