Sharing WEIShare - See how WEIShare was built (and get the code too)

Coding4Fun - Building the Windows Experience Index Share Site – WEIshare.net

“By now you’ve probably seen Larry’s video in which he explores the WEI Share (“We” share) project and what it does. Now we’re going to show you what went in to creating it, from building the desktop portion to grab the score to compiling the data to setting it up on Azure.

Lincoln Anderson, Web Designer

Peter Brownstein, Web Programmer

Peter Juchniewicz, Web Programmer

Peter VanRysdam, CMO 352 Media Group

Source Code: Download
Difficulty: Intermediate
Time Required: 30 hours (Website Programming), 50 hours (desktop programming), 20 hours (graphics/WPF design)
Software Needed: Microsoft Expression Blend, Visual Basic or Visual C# Express, SQL Server Management Studio
Hardware: PC with Windows Vista or higher (need access to a WinSAT XML file from Windows 7)

Creating the Silverlight App and Web Service – Peter B.

We originally set out to create a Silverlight Application that would display uploaded Windows Experience Index (WEI) Scores via a Web Service and Desktop Application. At the time, we created the application in Silverlight 3 and used a WCF Service to integrate with not only the desktop application but also the Silverlight application. Since we weren’t sure exactly where the WCF Service was being hosted in relation to the Web Site, one of the things we did was make it so the location of the WCF Service can be fairly easily changed. We ended up going with Silverlight Parameters to pass in the location of the WCF Service. Doing this was fairly easy, but it took some set up. The first step involved modifying App.xaml.cs to the following:

…

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The Coding4Fun group is one of my favorite MS groups. Not only do they do cool stuff (like t-shirt cannon robots and the DrinkTender) but even better they release the code they do it with. WEIShare is cool project that lets you share your Windows Experience Index (WEI) and see just how lame your system is when compared to others (err… um… I mean… how much room there is to improve your system… yeah… that… ;)

What I really liked about WEIShare was seeing the other scores for people with my same hardware. For example, the “PDC Acer 1420p’s” have two sets of numbers and it looks like the only difference is an older video driver is actually faster. See that is officially cool…