Mix 10K smart coding challenge


The Mix conference 2009 has organized a coding challenge on Silverlight/WPF with a restriction of using only 10Kb of source code. You can see the gallery of submissions at http://2009.visitmix.com/MIXtify/TenKGallery.aspx. Please visit and cast your vote for the entries you like, You can see my entry here.

My application allows you to search the twitter feeds over the internet using Twitter Search APIs(basically same as what you can see at http://search.twitter.com/) What I am trying to acheive here with silverlight is just another way to visualize the search data along the time line travelling towards the negative Z-space. One more interesting feature I wanted to add to this in the future version would be to give the ability to navigate through the Z-space with mouse scroll to see the older results. This same kind of UX(user experience) can be used to view any sort of time based feeds like blog feeds or search results. Architecturally the application is utilizing the following major features
1) DataTemplate
2) MVVM Pattern-Used mainly an ObservableCollection as the ViewModel to keep the UI notified on all the data change events.
3) Custom Panel - I have used a special panel called Space panel which arranges the items in a way to give a Parallax effect(2.5D)
4) LINQ - More specifically LINQ to XML to parse the incoming search data and other data processing.
Class diagram shown the Entity class and the Panel

My initial reaction to 10K code size restriction was that it would be too less to write this application. But you know, surpisingly with all the richness and power of .NET3.5(Specifically XAML,C#(ver3.0) and LINQ) we can write a moderately rich interactive application with just 10K of code. All the tips and tricks I have used to limit the code in 10Kb will be posted to you in my next blog.

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