Giant Flying Saucer

Whether its an instant messaging client running on your desktop or a customized one on an embedded website perhaps built in Flex/Flash, Silverlight, or even JavaScript/HTML you see chat apps everywhere now. Today we’ll look into how to quickly build a chat application using the following technologies:
1. The Midnight Coders WebORB for .NET
2. C# (.NET 3.5 Framework)
3. Microsoft’s Project Codenamed: Velocity
4. Adobe’s Flex Builder 3

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The Midnight Coders are a Texas based company that provides many solutions for developers. Ah, Texas! What a great state with great food! Today I’m going to talk about one of these solutions: WebORB for .NET

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Learning some of the basics of Silverlight 2 will help you to learn the more advanced capabilities available. In this tutorial we’ll be starting from the most basic, but arguably the most used controls in Silverlight 2: The Layout Controls.

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To complete this tutorial you will need a copy of Flex Builder 3 (there is a free trial version available) and Visual Studio 2008 (I used the “Professional” edition) with the .NET Framework 3.5 and IIS 6 or 7. Also you need to have the JSON AS3CoreLib.

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The good folks at the Midnight Coders have now merged the entire WebORB for .NET suite into one package and are giving it away free! This is really good news. A special thanks to all the people at the Midnight Coders.

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Here is a simple tutorial to show you how you can get WCF (hosted in ASP.NET) talking to Flex 3. I used Visual Studio 2008 Pro, IIS 7 and Flex Builder 3 (beta 3). I did my initial inspection of the data moving back and forth with Fiddler2 and Firebug.

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BlazeDS is now a release candidate. I’ve downloaded it and played around a bit. Hopefully as time permits I can post a tutorial for those wanting to give it a try and kick the tires so to speak.

For a project I’m working on I needed a way to be able to write a Flash CS3 SWF, put some controls into it as well as some methods and be able to call those methods and subscribe to the control’s events in the Flash CS3 SWF from Flex 3. When your working with Flash CS3 and Flex 3 things get much easier than using things like the LocalConnection class (not needed for Flash CS3 AS3 to Flex 3 communications). Here is a quick tutorial on how to do this.

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Using some existing non-blocking socket code from the Internet I was able to quickly craft together a basic socket connection to Flex 3. This of course would work just as well with Flash with just a couple minor changes. Basically I took the following code and put it into a new project in a Visual Studio 2008 C# console project and called it: TcpSock

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The GFS Server (a socket server for Flash CS3 and Flex 3) beta is now open. Swing on over to the new site (a work in progress) and get all the information. The forums have also opened up.

Now, its time for me to get started on some online multi-player Flash/Flex games!