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All I want for Christmas....is a Silverlight enabled Cool Wall!

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by Mark Johnston, Marketing Manager, Microsoft

The “Dear Santa” Christmas list is about as popular these days as a Geocities homepage to the Facebook generation! The team at DotNet Solutions in Windsor have come up with a novel (not noel) solution which combines the popular TopGear “cool wall” concept with Silverlight to allow users around the world to create their ultimate Christmas list.

The technology enables users to sign in using a Windows Live ID and through Windows Live Search APIs pull down images of the desired item (themed socks or a new Xbox 360). The user then drags the preferred image onto their wall, saves it and sends it onto their friends, ideally generous friends with large bank balances.

The “Dear Santa” Christmas list is about as popular these days as a Geocities homepage to the Facebook generation! The team at DotNet Solutions in Windsor have come up with a novel (not noel) solution which combines the popular TopGear “cool wall” with Silverlight to allow users around the world to create their ultimate Christmas list.

The technology enables users to sign in using a Windows Live ID and through Windows Live Search APIs pull down images of the desired item (themed socks or a new Xbox 360). The user then drags the preferred image onto their wall, saves it and sends it onto their friends, ideally generous friends with large bank balances.

To create your very own Cool Wall, follow these 3 easy steps:

1. Point your browser of choice at MyCoolUncool. If you haven’t installed Silverlight the page will prompt you to do that and will only take a few minutes

2. Get thinking on everything cool and un-cool and search for them using the search box at the top of the web page. Mixing ludicrously expensive items with more reasonable ones heightens the chance of getting something off that list. They should be sorted into categories of “Seriously Uncool”, “Uncool”, “Cool” and “Sub-Zero”

3. In the top right of the web page select the Options drop down list and Save the Cool Wall then forward it onto all your family and friends. And in return hopefully they will create a Christmas Coolwall to give you ideas on what to buy them!

Tim Sneath has a great article on how the application was prototyped in Silverlight 1.1 and then re-written by another evangelist in Seattle to Silverlight 1.0 – read more here.

If you want then please feel to leave your cool wall in the comments section of this blog post – mine is here.

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