I haven't posted in a long time, not because I haven't wanted to, but because I've been spending every minute of my free time working on a Session Scheduler application for CodeMash.

I can now talk about it because it's gone live!

The session scheduler was written in Silverlight 1.1 Alpha.  I would have written it in Silverlight 1.0 but I really wanted to be able to use Isolated Storage.  With Isolated Storage I was able to make the application store any changes the user makes locally, so the next time you go to the site it will be exactly where you left it and retain any of the sessions you've scheduled.

Using the Session Scheduler

The default view of the scheduler shows all sessions and Wednesday.  Unfortunately I didn't get around to implementing some sort of scrolling for the session list, but it was low on the list of features since the typical view of the application only has 6-8 sessions being shown at once.

You can click on the track buttons in the upper left to filter the session list by that track, or you can click on a session slot on the right (the agenda) and the session list will filter based on which sessions are available for that time of the day.

If you hover over a session menu item the session's details will drop down.  From that view, the green button can be used to schedule that session in your agenda.  Just hovering over the button will automatically show the time slot in the agenda where that session will occur.  Also, clicking on the speaker's name will show the speaker's bio.  This will show a picture of the speaker soon, but I'm having an issue displaying images in there at the moment.

You can click on the link image in the upper right to get a URL that can be used to send your custom agenda to someone else.  Currently, if you view another person's custom agenda it will overwrite any changes you've made yourself.  A workaround for this would be to copy a link to your agenda first, then use it once you're done looking at the other user's agenda.  I'm currently working on modifying this to save a history of agendas that you've looked at.

You can view my schedule here.

You can also click on the email image to view a simple HTML page with your custom agenda allowing you to print or email it from there.

I will be following up this post with several more describing the roadblocks I hit, and how I resolved, or worked around, them.