This is the sample application for my TechEd Australia 2010 session on Taking Silverlight Applications Outside the Browser, and my webcast for the SilverlightShow.net website of the same name. This sample implements a schedule builder for the TechEd Australia 2010 conference, which it does so by displaying the sessions using the PivotViewer control (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/pivotviewer/), like so:
The details of the corresponding session are displayed when you zoom in on a speaker’s photo. You can then hover the mouse over the photo, and an add/remove icon will appear that you can use to add or remove the session from your schedule.
You can then export your schedule to Outlook (when running outside the browser with elevated trust permissions), or to an iCal file. The conference ran between 24-27 of August, 2010, so you will find the data in your Outlook calendar then.
This application demonstrates the following Silverlight OOB features:
– Checking the whether the application is running outside the browser
– Checking the whether the application is installed
– Checking the whether the application has elevated trust permissions
– Detecting when the install state changes
– Toast notifications
– COM Interop to create appointments in Outlook
– Checking for updates to the application
– Custom chrome
– Writing directly to file
This application is also a good example of how the PivotViewer control can be used to create impressive applications.
Note that the toast notification ideally would be used to display a notification to the user 10 minutes before their next session. However, since the conference is over, and implementing it like so would be hard to demonstrate, the notification will simply be displayed when the application is running outside the browser, and the user adds a session to their schedule.
I’ve split the application into two downloads – one for the source code, and one for the data. This means you don’t need to download all the data if you only want to look at the code (although you will need the data to run the application). If you wish to run the application, you will need to unzip the data into your Web project’s folder. Don’t worry about adding the data to your Web project. There are *a lot* of files, and it will take a long time. Simply unzip the data into the Web project’s folder, such that the .cxml file is in the same folder as the HTML/ASPX page that hosts the Silverlight application.
You can download the source code here:
http://www.box.net/shared/s133o7ge6g
And the data here:
http://www.box.net/shared/b3mt73kor4
Note that to run this project, you will need the PivotViewer control, which you
can download from here: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/.
My thanks go to Rob Farley of LobsterPot Solutions who collated and processed the TechEd data, and kindly gave me his permission to use it in this demo.
If you missed my presentation, or didn’t make it to TechEd, you can catch me doing it again for the SilverlightShow.net website as a webcast next week. The details of this webcast are here: http://www.silverlightshow.net/news/Free-SilverlightShow-Webinar-Running-Silverlight-Outside-the-Browser-and-with-Elevated-Trust.aspx. It’s scheduled for September 7, and will go from 8am – 9am PDT. This is 1am Sydney time, and you can get your local time here. Miss that, well it will be posted online for you to view at your leisure.
Everything I cover is discussed in further detail in chapter 14 of my book Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4, which has just been released! 🙂
Chris Anderson 
Thanks for sharing its very useful. i follow you