WP7 client for TechDays.ru

Surely everyone who works with Microsoft technologies, a programmer and designer, a database or computer network administrator, faced with the need to search for training materials. The network has a huge number of sites where you can get the information of interest. There are frankly useless resources that you close only when you see, and treasuries of knowledge.

The first are not interesting to us, the second we will keep in bookmarks and we will return to them again and again. Among the latter, the dominant place is, of course, msdn.com , the exact amount of data on which, they know, probably, only in Microsoft. But MSDN is primarily a repository of textual information. If we want to receive information in a video format, then a better resource than TechDays.ru is not to be found.

TechDays.ru contains training video reports on various topics, divided into 3 levels of difficulty, ranging from simple ones, for which you do not need special knowledge, to complex ones, which you have to begin with experience. Convenient navigation through the site allows you to find and view the necessary reports in just a few clicks. It would seem - some positive aspects, if it were not for one BUT - the inability to view reports on mobile devices.
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To view the video, you need either Microsoft Silverlight player or Windows Media Player, which implies the presence of a desktop browser and Microsoft Windows as the operating system in the case of Windows Media Player. Neither the first nor the second, of course, not on the phone. For the new mobile operating system Windows Phone, almost all applications are developed on Silverlight, but even there is no Silverlight support in the browser, which makes viewing impossible. Awareness of this and the desire to explore a new interesting mobile platform led to writing a mobile client for the site TechDays.ru.

The client contains information about all reports on the site, which currently amounts to more than a thousand pieces, and, with the automatic database update enabled, it loads information about the most recently added reports. The built-in SQL Compact Edition database, which became available with the release of Mango, allowed us to develop the application in the usual way using Linq 2 SQL, which is also the only way to work with the database.

The program in a convenient and understandable form in Metro style allows you to search for reports by tags, categories, author, keywords and levels of complexity. Any report can be saved in the Favorites, which allows you to go to it without unnecessary searching. After the report is found, you are taken to a page with additional information about the report, such as rating, publication date, level of difficulty, or description.

An icon in the form of an eye is displayed next to each viewed report, which allows you to quickly determine whether we are looking at this report or not. You can quickly go to similar reports or the original page on the site techdays.ru to download additional materials (presentations, audio, source codes), or to leave a comment.

One of the most interesting points in the implementation was to reduce the size of the package. In uncompressed form, the base takes about 9 megabytes, archiving with 7z reduced the volume by 10 times. The resulting database archive when you first start the application is unpacked in the application storage (which, of course, takes some time). So at this moment it is not recommended to interrupt the work of the program, since the next time it starts it will still try to unpack it. The surprise was the complete lack of synchronous methods for working with the network; we had to rewrite part of the library for working with the site using asynchronous methods.

Now is the time to show some key screenshots:



Development plans:

• sync favorites and viewed
• Download reports to view offline
• remembering the position of the viewed report, with a subsequent transition to it
• publishing links to the report page on twitter and facebook

If there are more proposals, I will definitely consider it for implementation.

You can download the application in the Marketplace



UPDATE In order to avoid the fall of “TechDays Russia” and multiple reports of new reports, in connection with Tech ∙ Ed 2011, disable the background update. In the new version of the update will be revised.