Silverlight Movies (Silverlight + Live Search)
In my last post, I said I have been working on a demo project that I had to wait to till PubCon's announcement of Live Search 2.0 API!
So without further ado... here is a preview of Silverlight Movies. This is a movie showtime search driven by Windows Live Search 2.0 API.
The search that drives the initiation of the ComboBox is just searching for "showtimes". Live Search will automatically detect your location and return a set of movies. (Unfortunately, the initially list return is sometimes a weird list of movies results, but if you put in your zip code and click the search button before you select any movies, (I made a bug fix to update the zip code whenever we loose focus in the textbox) it'll repopulate the movie list... otherwise if the movie is not playing in your area, you might get an invalid zipcode error. I probably need to design a better interaction. :))
I started doing this application because I wanted to do something with the controls set that is a little more exciting than my Silverlight 2 Control demo. In my project, I have used the following:
- DataGrid
- ComboBox
- TabControl (Can you see which one is a TabControl?)
- UserControl
- Button
- TextBlock
I have plans to further re-template the other controls, but I thought I'll share this app anyway. The app uses LiveSearch to get the movie showtimes data which I databind to the ComboBox and DataGrid. LiveSearch is really cool, it automatically picks up your zipcode so you don't even have to input it. After I populate the list of movies, I use LiveSearch to search for movie poster. (Unfortunately, I think that doesn't work as well...).
Another thing that I find pretty cool is that I was able to do all the templating myself in Blend. I thought I did a pretty good job for a developer with minimal aesthetics skills. :) Go Blend team!
So to write your own Silverlight + Live application, here are a few useful links:
P.S. Sorry to disappoint everyone who thought this would be a Toolkit demo.
