Scott Guthrie has a series of tutorials on how to consume the Digg API with Silverlight and C#. I wanted to know if I could convert that tutorial to IronRuby.

What I came up has the same end result but due to the fact that IronRuby and its Silverlight implementation isn’t complete yet I can’t mimic the structure of that tutorial yet. I couldn’t yet figure out how to load external xaml files so I put all the xaml in one file.

I have one C# file that resides in the lib folder, this file is called DigStory.cs and contains a DiggStory class which represents a story on digg. It uses XLinq to parse the xml document and return a list of stories.

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The code contained in that file:

public class DiggStory
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
    public int NumDiggs { get; set; }
    public Uri HrefLink { get; set; }
    public string ThumbNail { get; set; }
    public string UserName { get; set; }

    public static IEnumerable ParseFeed(string feedContent)
    {
        var diggFeed = XDocument.Parse(feedContent);

        var result = from story in diggFeed.Descendants("story")
                     where story.Element("thumbnail") != null && !story.Element("thumbnail").Attribute("src").Value.EndsWith(".gif")
                     select new DiggStory
                     {
                         Id = (int)story.Attribute("id"),
                         Title = ((string)story.Element("title")).Trim(),
                         Description = ((string)story.Element("description")).Trim(),
                         ThumbNail = (string)story.Element("thumbnail").Attribute("src").Value,
                         HrefLink = new Uri((string)story.Attribute("link")),
                         NumDiggs = (int)story.Attribute("diggs"),
                         UserName = (string)story.Element("user").Attribute("name").Value,
                     };

        return result;
    }
}

I won’t post the xaml file because it’s a bit too long. I will however post the app.rb file and offer a little bit more explanation on that file.

The app.rb file:

require "System"
require "Silverlight"
require "System.ServiceModel.Web"

require "Contract"

include System
include System::Net
include System::Windows

class App < SilverlightApplication
  use_xaml

  def get_topic_url(topic)
	  "http://services.digg.com/stories/topic/#{topic}?count=20&appkey=http%3A%2F%2Fflanders.co.nz%2Fblog"
  end

  def initialize

	  search_button.click do |sender, e|
		topic = search_textbox.text

		client = WebClient.new
		client.download_string_completed do |sender, args|
			return unless args.error.nil?

			stories = DiggStory.parse_feed(args.result);
			stories_list.selected_index = -1;
			stories_list.items_source = stories;
		end
		client.download_string_async Uri.new(get_topic_url(topic))

	  end

	  stories_list.selection_changed do |sender, args|
		  story = stories_list.selected_item

		  story_detail.data_context = story;
		  story_detail.visibility = Visibility.Visible
	  end

	  close_button.click do |sender, args|
		story_detail.visibility = Visibility.Collapsed

	  end
  end
end

App.new

The above code contains all the code necessary for our application.

We first tell the application to use the app.xaml file. Next we define a method that builds us the request url for the digg api. I chose to use the xml format to stay as close as possible to the sample of Scott.

Like in the C# sample we’re also downloading the file asynchronous. In the callback for when the request completes we parse the returned string into a list of stories and set that as the item source of our Listbox in the app.xaml file.

We handle the selection_changed event of the ListBox to display a detail view on a story with a link to the digg page.

More explanation on the xaml can be found on Scotts blog.

Make sure you get the bits you need from the dynamic silverlight website needed for running dynamic silverlight applications.

Put the path to chiron.exe in your PATH variable and extract the contents of the downloaded sample. open a command prompt and go to the location where you extracted the files to. type chiron /b and click on index.html

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