Only One Day Left…
Not too long ago Page Brooks and myself made the three and a half hour drive from Florence, SC to Greensboro, NC to attend the Ineta Carolina Community Leadership Summit '08. This was a great event and there we meet a lot of the local Ineta user group leaders. We also meet Andrew Duthie, aka DEvHammer. One issue that rose to the top of things we wanted to work on improving at the leadership summit was awareness of events that are occurring in the local regional area. That’s when Andrew told everyone about the project he has been working on: Community Megaphone.
I love have information at my fingertips, so I decided to write a tie-in application:
Community Megaphone Reader
Basically, this application connects to the Community Megaphone RSS feed and pulls down event data. Then it takes your current GPS position and calculates your distance from each event. Finally, it takes all the events and sorts then so you can find the event that is the closest to you. This is a great application for the traveling .NET geek. Where ever you are you can find great .NET events to attend.
The UI is paying homage to Andrew’s Community Megaphone site. I tried to match the basic colors to keep it familiar. The hyperlinks are active and will take you the event’s page on Community Megaphone. The menu only has a few options: Refresh, About, and Exit.
An application like this is really exciting, because it is tying the world of mobile together with the world wide web.
These types of mashup applications will contitue to take of for years.
LoadRss Method
1: public static DataSet LoadRss(string requestUriString)
2: {
3: HttpWebRequest feed = HttpWebRequest.Create(requestUriString) as HttpWebRequest;
4: StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(feed.GetResponse().GetResponseStream());
5:
6: string rssXml = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
7: rssXml = rssXml.Replace(@"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?>", string.Empty);
8:
9: StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(rssXml);
10:
11: DataSet dataSet = new DataSet();
12: dataSet.ReadXml(stringReader);
13:
14: return dataSet;
15: }
GetEvents Method
1: public static List<Item> GetEvents(DataSet dataSet, GpsPosition gpsPosition)
2: {
3: List<Item> items = new List<Item>();
4:
5: foreach (DataRow dataRow in dataSet.Tables["item"].Rows)
6: {
7: Item item = new Item();
8: item.Title = (string)dataRow["title"];
9: item.Description = (string)dataRow["description"];
10: item.Link = (string)dataRow["link"];
11: item.PublishDate = DateTime.Parse((string)dataRow["pubDate"]);
12: item.Latitude = Double.Parse((string)dataRow["lat"]);
13: item.Longitude = Double.Parse((string)dataRow["long"]);
14:
15: if(gpsPosition.LatitudeValid && gpsPosition.LongitudeValid)
16: item.Distance = GeoCodeCalc.CalcDistance(gpsPosition.Latitude, gpsPosition.Longitude, item.Latitude, item.Longitude);
17:
18: items.Add(item);
19: }
20:
21: items.Sort(delegate(Item item1, Item item2)
22: {
23: return item1.Distance.CompareTo(item2.Distance);
24: });
25:
26: return items;
27: }
Display Events Method
1: public static string DisplayEvents(List<Item> events)
2: {
3: StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
4:
5: foreach (Item item in events)
6: {
7: stringBuilder.Append(@"<span style=""color: #FFFFFF;font-weight:bold;"">");
8: stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<a href=""{0}"" style=""color: #DBB94F;"">{1}</a><br/><br/>", item.Link, item.Title);
9: stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"{0}<br/><br/>", item.Description);
10: stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<b>Distance: <span style=""color: #DBB94F;"">{0} miles</span></b><br/>", item.Distance.ToString("0.00"));
11: // stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<b>{0}</b><br/>", item.PublishDate);
12: // stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"{0}<br/>", item.Latitude);
13: // stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"{0}<br/>", item.Longitude);
14: stringBuilder.AppendFormat(@"<br/><br/>");
15: stringBuilder.Append(@"</span>");
16: }
17:
18: return stringBuilder.ToString();
19: }
Possibilities:
Andrew recently added iCalendar file support to Community Megaphone. This would be a great feature to add to a Windows Mobile application, and it is totally doable. The HTML could be a little more fancy maybe even use a few 16x16 fonts for a little personality.
Download executable: communityMegaphoneReader.cab
Download Source Code: communityMegaphoneReader.zip
Feedback:
Want more? What else would you like to see? Time’s running out only one more day. Be sure to get your ideas in soon!