Screencast: WPF+SL2 Silverlight Clients

My Demo's Happen Here entry (entries closed last month) was on Visual Studio 2008, how it can rock your socks by creating Twitter clients in WPF and Silverlight.

Or you can stream the original video in WMV from Silverlight.Live.Com. You can download the solution (73kB) containing the three projects, which requires the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK.

For interests sake, the screencast was recorded using Microsoft's Community Clips Recorder and edited with Windows Movie Maker - both free (well, providing you have Windows). Community Clips Recorder is fairly basic when you compare it against Camtasia, as it has no editing, zooming, or highlighting capabilities. However depending on the situation Camtasia is overly complex and the price difference is something to be considered.

WLM Game Status 0.3

Last year I began creating a Windows Live Messenger plugin which set your status (through DDE) to what game you were playing. Unfortunately development was cut short when I realised it had a really nasty habit of chewing up CPU resources.

However, I'm happy to say I've squashed that bug by using a single process handler, rather than one for each game. A rather obvious mistake when you think about it, but truth be told, I haven't thought about it for months! I've also added all the games in the Xfire_Games.ini file, which is somewhere in the thousands! Obviously, I haven't tested all of these, so they may not all work.

Unfortunately, WLM still requires signed DLL's/can't seem to handled unmanaged code wrappers for the plugins so it has limited ability to 'replace' XFire for in game chat…a separate program would have to be running/called by the plugin for that to work. My knowledge of DirectX is limited at best, so it may be one of those things that never happens.

Install Instructions

1. Download WLM Game Status from CodePlex
2. Open up RegEdit.exe
3. In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSNMessenger, set AddInFeatureEnabled to 1
4. Create HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Aeoth, add a new String Value called Location. Set the value of 'Location' to where you extracted the dll and xml files (ie, D:\wsg0.1)
5. Install the DLL into the Global Assembly Cache - drag and drop it into C:\Windows\Assembly or from commandline, gacutil -I wgs.addin.dll
6. Run Windows Live Messenger, Options, Add-ins, Find the DLL, Click 'Settings', Detect Games. Close that settings window
7. Use the drop down where you set your 'status', and you should see a "Turn on 'WGS'". Select that.
8. Play games!

To Do

• Easier installer
• In game chat (via separate program/relaying messages)
• XFire_games.ini import utility/auto-update of database file