Using Umbraco in a WPF application

Saturday, May 30, 2009 2 minute read Tags: Umbraco LINQ to Umbraco
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

One of the goals of LINQ to Umbraco is to be able to have Umbraco applications which are done without a web context, starting to using Umbraco as a service.

Now there's been plenty of ways to do this in the past, you can quite easily have a web service which pushes out the data you require, but I wanted to do it entirely without web stuff.

With Code Garden coming up in a few weeks I decided to have a look into writing something to show off the concept I was thinking of, that you could write a WPF application which is entirely driven from Umbraco content.
When reading a recent blog post from Scott Hanselman in which he talks about a tool he uses when doing presentations which reads Twitter hash tags and he can get audience feedback. So I thought, why not do that, but using Umbraco for the messages rather than Twitter.

Enter the Umbraco Notifier

So my concept was decided, you would have a small WPF app that sits in the system tray and check an Umbraco XML file for changes.
To go along with that I would have an Umbraco instance running which has a simple web form that people can submit their notification to me.

Now I'm not going to give away the code here, thats a secret for CG, but pictures are worth 1000 words, so how many words is a screen cast worth? Follow the link to see the notifier in action!

You'll probably want to turn your computer speakers off, I'm still learning how to use the software and the background noise is well... backgroundy :P.

 

So there you have it folks, an Umbraco driven WPF application, with LINQ to Umbraco in full operation.