Om wat voeling te krijgen met .NET 3.0 en vooral met WPF heb ik een simpele streaming radio speler gemaakt die je ook kan bedienen vanuit de system tray. Dit klein projectje heb ik dan ook toepassend TrayRadio gedoopt, enkele screenshots ter illustratie:
Via het hoofdscherm (of tray icoon, naast de tijdsweergave rechts onderaan…) kan je een zender kiezen en afstemmen. De led links onderaan geeft een statusweergave. Verder verschijnt ook het logo van de zender, genre, een weergave van de RSS feed en kan je ook nog de webcam van de zender bekijken door over het webcam icoon te bewegen.
De configuratie van de zenders gebeurt via een simpel xml bestand:
<Station>
<Url>http://mp3.streampower.be/donna-high</Url>
<Quality>4</Quality>
<LogoUrl>http://…/donnaLogo.jpg</LogoUrl>
<Title>Donna</Title>
<WebcamUrl>http://…webcam004.jpg</WebcamUrl>
<StationGenre>Pop & dance</StationGenre>
<StationWebsite>http://www.donna.be</StationWebsite>
<RssSource>http://www.donna.be/rss.xml</RssSource>
</Station>
Op deze manier kan iedereen zelf een zender toevoegen indien deze zou ontbreken, de meeste Vlaamse zenders heb ik reeds in het standaard bestand ingevoerd.
Klik hier om TrayRadio te downloaden, indien je Windows XP gebruikt, download dan eerst .NET 3.5 hier, bij Vista gebruikers zou alles normaal moeten werken.
Klik hier om te downloaden (uitvoerbare bestanden)!
Edit : Klik hier om de broncode te downloaden!
Wanneer mensen me vragen in welke programmeertaal (en omgeving) ik programmeer kijkt ongeveer iedereen raar op wanneer ik de woorden .Net, C# en Visual Studio over de lippen haal. De link met Microsoft is voor velen dan snel gelegd en hieruit besluiten ze dan botweg dat Java / C++ "veel beter is". In drie posts zal ik de drie delen van mijn toolset nader toelichten. Hiermee wil ik beginnende (en gevorderde) programmeurs aansporen .NET in overweging te nemen als programmeerplatform.
Het .NET framework is ondertussen al een goeie 5 jaar oud, de meest recente versie is de 3.5 versie. Deze bevat een enorm uitgebreide bibliotheek aan klassen (ingebouwde functionaliteit) die ervoor zorgen dat je meteen aan de slag kan, hieronder heb ik de belangrijkste kenmerken en voordelen op een rijtje gezet.
De volgende post zal de features van C# (3.0) toelichten, stay tjoened!
Microsoft’s Adobe Flashkiller has left it’s cradle: Silverlight, previously known as WPF/E (part of the .NET 3.0 Framework) is amongst us! I agree that this release couldn’t have come at a worse time, some time ago Sun released JavaFX and Adobe has launched Flex 2. Although Silverlight will probably have a tough time converting the non-(msft.)believers to the platform, but one has to admit Silverlight’s features look most promising. Msft. has even guaranteed that they’d make work of cross platform plugins for Silverlight (A MACOSX plugin is already available).
What makes Silverlight different from any other rich client-side application is that all markup is actualy stored in a nice and nifty XML format called XAML. The XAML format can be consired like a kind of nextgen HTML. Because these rich & interactive documents are stored in a textual format (XML), the applications can be searched through by a search engine. This is something no competitor of Silverlight is able to do. And because searchability is especially important for websites (think of an online store), this might be what will lift Silverlight of it’s cradle and will motivate it’s insertion into the WWW.
Yet another thing which suggest the future dominance of Silverlight as the future technology for rich-media websites is Expression Blend (2). Expression Blend supports the design of Silverlight application (using XAML offcourse) in both a graphic and programmatic setting. Together with future Silverlight support of the Visual Studio IDE, this makes design and development of these next-gen webapplications a whole lot easier as oppose to JavaFX, for which you should have installed a couple of programs and framework for it to launch.
I’ve checked out the alpha version and it took me about 5 minutes to have my first Silverlight app up and running. I’m impressed! If your not, you should definitely check out some of the Silverlight reference sites:
I was really BLOWN away after seeing some examples of the technology, there’s a real chemistry between both presentation and content. This IS the future of the web…
If you click the Login link on the main page, ASP.Net will auto create a ReturnUrl Querystring. After you logged in succesfully you will be redirected to the page you came from. The problem is that the DestinationPageUrl property won’t work anymore if you have a ReturnUrl Querystring. This causes a problem for us because the user will be redirected to the login page instead of the DestinationPageUrl.
We’ve searched for solutions but there isn’t a clean solution. Here’s a way to solve the problem (redirect to the Default page if a ReturnUrl querystring is present).
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string strRedirect;
strRedirect = Request["ReturnUrl"];
if (strRedirect != null)
Response.Redirect(”~/Default.aspx”, true);
}
I spent the morning trying to figure out how we could migrate the ASP.NET membership database (which is a SQLExpress DB) to SQL Server 2005. This great article gave us more than enough info to do this, although we ran into some problems along the way. Nevertheless we got things up and running again…
Good news today, we’ve finished developing a small additional project for our internship at Ordina Belgium. It’s an ASP.NET Ajax powered website that will enable the competence leaders to post online video courses on the net for the consultants, here’s a list of features:
- Completely XML customizable
- Customizable themes
- Animated Text while the video is playing (like subtitles…)
- Nice & simple Ajax GUI!
I have to say I’m pretty exicted about the result, I like it alot 
I have to say we’ve had a bit of trouble updating the playtime of the video with the text, the final solution is a mixture of iframe,ajax,javascript and a good old Session variable. The text also fades out and in when it changes, cool 
For anyone who’s interested, we based our mediaplayer code on this article, we had to recompile the DLL and make some code modifications first to optimize things. There was also an error in the code so that the height of the videoplayer wasn’t set, luckily we managed to fix this to!
Took us just a few Google lookups, but we’ve had some problems with the Panel control in the standard ASP.NET toolbox. The panels were drawn over the other content of our site. The solution: simply remove the height attribute of the panel… Guess solutions don’t have to be that hard all of the time…
