My first Silverlight Web application

  • July 19, 2010
  • James Skemp
The more I do with Microsoft technologies the hard it becomes for me to want to move outside of them. With the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2010, which is the best development tool I think I've ever used, it's easy to get sucked in. Since I've wanted to experiment with it for a while, and since I needed to do some kind of development after slacking off this weekend, I looked into creating a simple Silverlight application that would use the same Web service I created late last month.

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Function to Parse a Microsoft JSON DateTime returned from a WCF service in JavaScript

  • July 4, 2010
  • James Skemp
When a DateTime is converted to JSON in a WCF Web service (WebHttp in this particular case) it's semi-difficult to convert that to something we can use when we return the date to a client via JavaScript. For example: "LastPlayed":"\/Date(1278187099000-0400)\/" After almost an hour of research and goofing around with this, I've come up with the following, which seems to work just fine on Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6, and Chrome 5.

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RESTful WCF Web services, easily

  • June 15, 2010
  • James Skemp
I know I should know them better so I've been looking into WCF Web services, with a heavy lean towards an implementation based on REST principles. After a good deal of research, where it was highly suggested that while ASP.NET MVC may make sense, WCF is still the way to go for Web services, I stumbled upon WCF WebHttp Services, which uses functionality released in .NET 4. After a painless install via Visual Studio 2010's Extension Manager (more information), and troubleshooting a stupid mistake on my end, I was able to quickly create a Web service that uses an assembly I had created to parse one of my iTunes Playlists to Xml files and return a listing of tracks for a particular artist.

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