My Journey with the StackExchange API

On May 23, Jeff Atwood posted an announcement to the StackOverflow blog.  The StackOverflow team was getting to work on version 1.0 of the StackExchange API.  As you know from my previous post, I’m something of a StackExchange fan.  Needless to say (though I’ll say it anyway) I was pumped (did that rhyme?)

Two months later, I’ve created three new open-source projects based on the StackExchange API:

StackLINQ: A LINQ Provider to the StackExchange API
StackedDeck:  The TweetDeck of StackExchange.  Watch questions from any and all StackExchange sites stream in by tag.
StackWatcher:   A system tray application that watches in real-time for changes in your rep, favorites, and badge awards, and notifies you with some popup toast.

This effort has been an intensive and interesting experience.  I learned a TON about LINQ and Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF being the basis for StackedDeck and StackWatcher.  I won’t lie and say I did it just for the fun of it. I would love to win cool stuff for my efforts, but that’s truly not the whole deal.

LINQ, WPF, and Silverlight are three of my favorite Microsoft technologies.  I’ve learned a lot more by writing the StackLINQ library and the WPF apps, and I’ll be blogging and demoing my experience over the next several months, starting with StackLINQ.  StackedDeck is now version 0.9 beta.  It will be getting a major refactoring as I refine it to take better advantage of binding and MVVM.  I will probably roll StackWatcher’s functionality into StackedDeck, and will definitely be updating StackedDeck when the StackExchange API v2 is released, so you can ask and answer questions too!

This process will be “televised”- that is, blogged and probably made into videos.  All three projects are on BitBucket for your perusal at the links above.  Enjoy, and watch this space to follow my progress.