Buzzy And Me

About 5 months ago, I made a Flex/AIR application called Stockastica. It was a virtual stock trading simulation. Subsequently, I ported it to Silverlight 2 Beta 1. The first beta was just released and I was eager to see what I could do with it. It wasn’t a very complicated app. Only basic web services were used. I made the app and forgot about it.

Today, I decided to port the app to beta 2. It is quite daunting when you start out. But like all things, you only need to find the right resources to help you get started. Probably the most helpful one was a post on /dev/arthur. It solved almost all my problems.

If you are hosting the app on IIS7, don’t forget to add a .xap extension with a mime type of application/x-silverlight. Porting apps that use sockets was a bit troublesome. A detailed description of the changes between beta 1 and 2 is available here.

A screencast of the ported application…

Silverlight Stockastica Demo from Chinmay Garde on Vimeo.
Regards,
Buzzy

Now that Stockastica is fully ready, I have been working on porting the Stockastica Flex application to AIR.

Porting any Flex application to AIR involves changing the <Application> tags to <WindowedApplication> and adding an XML file. It is painfully simple. I did spend some time adding features that are specific to a desktop application.

We also spent some time modifying the CSS properties to give it a customized look( though I am pretty sure I managed to ruin even the plain vanilla look ). It felt weird knowing that I was modifying the presentation layer of a desktop application using CSS. But it works flawlessly and I was really impressed, especially after I had gone through the harrowing experience of styling and skinning the Silverlight app. Using XAML resources is not as intuitive as using CSS.

Here is a screencast of Version 2.0 of the App I finally prepared after porting it to AIR. I am sorry about the large resolution. Will post another one on a lower resolution soon. Hope you like what you see. Please leave your comments below. I would love to hear any suggestions.

Buzzy