Robs Usability Development : Silverlight, ASP.NET, Ajax, Agile, MVC & Volta

The pokerroom is a technical showcase I created to use in my presentations. I have tried to put everything that makes silverlight stand out into the project.

At the moment I’m busy cleaning up the source code so it can be released to the public. It has been tested with IE6/7 and Firefox on windows.

Until then you can see the progress at: http://www.silverlightpoker.net

Design & 2.0

I’m in the process of getting a real designer to redesign the pokerroom, and in a few weeks (probably after Mix) the application has to be made compatible with Silverlight 2.0. I’ll keep you all posted on the progress.

Suggestions are always welcome, please use the contact form.

Bugs / Features

Because it is just a showcase I did in my spare time, it is definetly not without bugs. There are also some parts of the Poker Game that are not yet implemented (Side pots, All in, and more..).

Technical

The backend was created in Visual Studio 2008, with ASP.NET 3.5, Linq2Sql and the Linq2sql designer. The frontend in Blend 2 with the silverlight 1.1 alpha preview code. The communication goes trought webservices with a generated proxy in Silverlight.

Geek

As a true geek/nerd, there are a few things in the application I’m fond of.

• There is a real PokerHand comparer that can compare 11 billion hands per second ;-), totally useless ofcourse but just as fun.
• The webservice calls are long running. Meaning that as long as there are no messages they stay open and sleep. A very simple but effective way to minimize webservice calls.
• The colors in the chatbox, were a hell of a job, but just look nice!.
• When the server restarts or when the session goes away, the client app will recognize and restart itself.