Replaced my MSDN Graphic Header with Silverlight

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When you create an MSDN blog here at Microsoft you’re pretty much given very little access to it, especially if you want to customize it. I’ve managed to basically hack my way around this through both CSS and JavaScript manipulation.

Tonight, I decided to hijack my graphical header and put Silverlight over the top, as basically given I’m a Product Manager for the darn product it just makes more sense for me to dogfood the product.

That and I was curious to see how far I could push the envelope on blogs.MSDN.com.

I quickly put together a Twitter feed which pops up every few seconds with what I’m saying to the world. It cycles through the latest feeds from my account.

Brownen from Soul Solutions stated that it could get pretty annoying, I think she maybe right but I’ll see how it goes and if feedback is negative, I’ll approach it differently in the next wave of creativity.

Hope all like it.

Special thanks to Jonas and Emil for their code, as I found combining Emil’s LinkLabel control with Jonas’ Yahoo Pipes Twitter Proxy to be a better fit overall.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2009
    I like it. But it takes a lot of time to load. I still like it, especially the tweets on the left.

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2009
    Time to load: Sadly because i have zero access to the HTML or the FTP to this site, I have to host the external Silverlight piece on my personal domain. Which basically means you as a user are downloading from two seperate domains. This in turn can add weight to the JavaScript onLoad routine..

  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2009
    What about putting the silverlight on Microsoft's free Silverlight Streaming account?  I have yet to try this, but there's a chance the response time might improve. Great design.  I do not find the twitter feed too distracting.

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2009
    Hey Scott, love it - yeah it takes a while to load, but then again, not in a hurry so it's no biggie. however, the "Follow me" button (nice touch btw) doesn't seem to be working for me. am i missing something vital here? wrong twitter client? wrong side of the world?