Silverlight Retail Financial Services Demonstrator - Source Code released!
Following all of the excitement around Silverlight 2 at MIX last week, last night we quietly released the source code for the Silverlight Retail Financial Services Demonstrator onto an unsuspecting interweb. This is a technology demonstrator that shows how you can build a rich, immersive online banking experience in Silverlight, and it's got some really shmik features that I wish MY bank had. These include interactive 'what-if' games you can play with your mortgage, being able to schedule payments and model how these affect your account balance through the month, and navigating your stock portfolio, amongst lots of other cool things.
If you are interested in getting a quick overview, there's videoed session from MIX posted up at the VisitMix OpenSpace blog. However, if you're like me, you'll probably just want to download the source and start playing with it, which is what I did :) Here it is, running in (ahem) another browser.
Note, I followed the instructions in the distribution to get this up and running, which are pretty good. However, this is one small change you might need to make in order to get it working on your system. Initially, once I had it all set up, I ran the application, and was rewarded with... a blank browser page. A bit of investigation revealed the cause: in the file TestPage.html.js, you'll find a Javascript function createSilverlight. The first thing this function does is make a call to SilverLight.createObjectEx(), passing a source parameter for the SL xap of "BankingDemo.xap". However, this xap actually lives in the ClientBin subdirectory, and so my browser couldn't find it. Quite simply, the call to createObjectEx never returned a functioning silverlight object to the browser. The fix was simple: just qualify the name in the source parameter as "ClientBin/BankingDemo.xap", as shown below, and all should run fine.
Happy Retail Financial Service Demonstrator Code Tinkering :)
