Using Silverlight to display books from an Amazon Web Service
I’ve been playing around with formatting XAML for Silverlight on the server side and I decided to mash-up some XML from an Amazon web service and get it to display a list of books. Here’s a sample page …
I ran into a few limitations but overall it went pretty well. The plugin doesn’t display .gif’s yet (only .jpgs and .pngs) which is a big disappointment because at least half of the book images coming from Amazon are .gifs. Surely that will be addressed in the final release, whatever the issue is … licensing possibly? I also found that formatting the TextBlocks had to be done very manually, no style sheets or anything so the font changes had to be repeated for each row. If you would like to see the source code, use FireFox, FireBug, hit the Net tab and find the sp1.xaml file.
This is some cool stuff, I need to do some animation with it in my next sample.
