In my first post about Popfly, I commented that the first thing I wanted to do was play around with the extensibility mechanism that is at the core of Popfly called Blocks.

After downloading the SDK (sorry, its still in restricted to Alpha testers) but you can get on the waiting list if you have a Windows Live ID here.

Over the next week or so I plan to dive into an example Block I have thought up. But right now I want to give you a broad overview of Alpha Popfly Block Development on a PC.

DISCLAIMER - this stuff will likeley change in the future. After all its still in Alpha (as defined by the Popfly Team).

After downloading the SDK and skimming through the documentation I set up a Visual Studio project to host my Block development. Building Blocks (no pun intended) is done entirely in pure Javascript AJAXian goodness. No managed code is used to create Blocks.

Popfly is all Javascript so there is no .NET assemblies in the References or Properties Folders.

The SDK uses the "Blocks" folder to load Blocks you want to test. RSSCombine.js is my Block that I will talk to you about it in my next posts.

The "Samples" folder contains the other demo Blocks. Drag them up to the "Blocks" folder to test one of them out. The XML files are the block description files (more on those in future posts)

The "Support" folder has all the Popfly runtime Javascript files. Notice that included in the support files is the Microsoft Ajax Library.

The "Default.aspx" is the host for Popfly blocks and serves as a test harness. I set this page as the "start-up" page in visual studio.

That's how I set up for developing locally. In the second part of this first look, I'll show you Popfly development in the Popfly site.

Stay tuned - Part II up next