SilverlightTM 4 Problem — Design — Solution

Chapter 9. Sharing Your Success

Creating the Public Fitness Journal

Now that you've finished the main data entry features of the site, it's time to consider adding an additional feature that will make the site feel more like some of the other Web 2.0-style sites on the Internet. This chapter focuses on adding some very basic social networking components to FitnessTrackerPlus. You'll enable users of the site to share their fitness journal information with others. By using the Silverlight Navigation Framework, you'll see how you can provide your users with a URL that will lead visitors directly to their public journal and even allow the page to be bookmarked.

Additionally, visitors that arrive at this public facing version of the user's fitness journal will be able to post HTML-based comments in order to provide motivation and support in helping your users achieve their fitness goals. Yes, you heard me right—I did say HTML-based comments. I know this is a Silverlight application and, as you may have learned the hard way in your own applications, Silverlight has no native support for displaying HTML based content unless you use the new WebBrowser control available in Silverlight 4. Unfortunately, this new control only works in out-of-browser scenarios so this doesn't really help much in the FitnessTrackerPlus application.

To provide the comment system you'll make use of an old friend of mine from the ASP.NET world called the Ajax Control Toolkit. This powerful, freely available Toolkit ...