7/21/09 - UPDATE: Added  Source Code (see bottom)

With Internet Explorer 8 it’s easy to build Silverlight Web Slices; great examples of this are the OneRiot Today’s Hottest Video or MIX 09 Web Slice.

But…how does it work?

Let’s have a look to the “Imagine Cup Web Slice”,  just uploaded to the IE Gallery. The slice has been written by Sergei Golubev, one of the most brilliant (ex-) Microsoft Student Partner around the world!

You can install it here.

I think the architecture is very interesting, as it include a lot of best practices.

 (Click on the image for high res)

• The Web Slice aggregates several data sources: the IC RSS Feed, the IC Twitter tweets and the tagged images from Flickr.

SYNC (ICSlice.aspx):

• It use the Alternative Update Source to show updates in the Title. If the content changes, the title of the Web Slice will go bold and flash for a few seconds.
• The content of the Alternative Update Source is just the date of the last update of the data sources. This way we reduce the bandwidth needed for each sync.
• The back-end logic use a .NET Web Service, with an internal caching layer. This allow to avoid the common Twitter limit.
• The TTL is set to 15 minutes; this is how often IE will do a sync and check for updates.

VIEW (ICView.aspx):

• Client UI and logic written in Silverlight, using the Alternative Display Source.
• In case Silverlight is not installed on the machine, a graceful message will appear.

OTHER:

• The Bookmark link has been set to the Imagine Cup homepage.
• All the links in the Web Slice will open in a new tab (target = "_Blank”)
• The entire project is hosted on Windows Azure. Free, cool, easy. Just awesome.

Check out this blog for the source code! Coming soon…

The full source code is now available here!

Adaptive Blue recently released the Glue Toolbar for Internet Explorer 8.  Glue helps you discuss things you are interested in with your friends around the web; it connects conversations, recommend new books, music or movies to your friends…and reveal what things users are paying attention to as they browse the web.

This is how Alex, one of the mind behind this very sophisticated architecture, commented the development of Glu:

“This is seriously, one of the most challenging projects in my 15 year software of software engineering. The good news is that resulting product is elegant, sharing 90% of common core code with 10% adapters for each platform. Yet more satisfying is the performance on IE8 is the same as on Firefox.” (Alex Iskold, AdaptiveBlue)

Here’s the steps to try out Glue:

1. Install Internet Explorer 8
2. Install Glue Toolbar for IE8
3. Create an account
4. Browse to your favorite site (for instance, www.amazon.com)
5. You’re done! You can now view your friends suggestion, give your 2 cents tips, …

Ok, but how all this work? Alex has already written a few posts to go through the API, and I know is preparing an article to share his experience with this project. In the meantime, using the Developer Tools integrated in IE8, I did my homework :-)

When you visit a site, Glue append dynamically a small script to the page; you can see how this script asynchronously retrieve the complete Glue library, which is a proxy to the logic developed within the BHO component and the Glue web services. It’s a very clean approach, which allow AdaptiveBlue to extend any site without affecting the existing behaviors or functionalities.

I find this toolbar very attractive, specially if you have hundreds of friends in your social networks :-)

The next step is probably to build an IE8 Accelerator or an IE8 Web Slice connected to Glue. Anyone from the community want to take the challenge?

Well done Adaptive Blue!