Download Live QnA Screensaver; wow us with your gadgets!

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:10:45 GMT

Hey everyone,

We’ve got some more good stuff for developers coming your way. I hope you all took a gander at the QnA folks on Channel 9 – talking about QnA and the beautiful thing that happens when people are in the mix of the search process, aka “social search.”

(Niner Nektar, we take your UI comments entirely to heart by the way. J )

Yes, my QnA gadget is finally live on the Gallery! I’m hoping to find more of you writing gadgets against our RSS queries . The possibilities are endless! Look up QnA answers on a place in Africa and mash it up with a Live Local map of Africa showing the region….create a gadget that allows you to ask questions from the live.com home page (or Vista sidebar)….combine video search with an answer tool so you can more easily answer QnA questions with videos.

Because QnA doesn’t actually have an official version of its gadget yet, the field is still open. I’m happy to work with a community developer who has a gadget finished, to get their gadget through the live.com gadget team process to represent us officially if you write something amazing. Even if you just end up on the Gallery, we would totally pimp you on this here blog. And right now, since it’s only competition is my QnA Tag Search gadget – what are you waiting for?

We’ve also love to showcase in the blog other applications written by developers that make use of our RSS feeds, not necessarily gadgets.

We’ve got a simple and cool Live QnA screensaver that scrolls current questions across your screen written by Microsoft intern Danyal Anik; amazingly, he wasn’t a QnA intern at all but worked for the Identity and Access team…We “borrowed him” during an intern hackday and he worked nights and weekends to make it work.

--Betsy Aoki, Live QnA Program Manager

Here’s more in Danyal’s own words...

Who: Danyal Anik

Intern project area: Identity & Access team’s CardSpace (http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/infocard/default.aspx)

I am a senior at UC Davis pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with a minor in Management and Technology. I am involved in research related to sensor networks under Professor Raju Pandey and have also founded an inter-UC undergraduate research journal – the Silicon Bond with the aim of helping undergraduate researchers publish their work. After graduating, I would like to pursue a master’s degree in computer science and/or work for a few years and then pursue an MBA.

On a personal note, I enjoy tennis, playing the guitar, diverse genres of music, and German cars.

At Microsoft, I volunteered to work on the Live QnA screensaver in addition to completing my core project. Prior to the screensaver, I had never worked on a program with visual (graphics) components, which made this a great learning experience. The screensaver was written in C# and I used the screensaver starter kit provided with Visual Studio as a foundation. I used this template code to figure out the rest of the code I needed to write and modify in order to get the design looking the way I wanted.

The piece that took the longest for me to write was the sliding selection bar. In the original version the selection bar jumped from item to item, but I thought this was too plain and not adequate for a screensaver, which is why I modified it to slide. The background image is a static bitmap that I put together by chopping up various pieces of the actual Live QnA site. I originally planned to render the majority of the background in code however realized it would be much easier for me to make it static since it doesn’t interact with anything else.

Though I am sure there are still some bugs left to be taken care of and the code isn’t the most beautiful given the short time in which I wrote it, this was a great chance for me to work on something that I hadn’t worked on before. Hopefully you will enjoy using it and/or modifying it as much as I enjoyed working on it.

Live QnA: QnA Downloads and Tech Stuff

Download Live QnA Screensaver; wow us with your gadgets!