Tired of Channel 9 in a browser

What would it take to create a client based application to read, post and download content from Channel 9?

I presume you use the MetaWeblogAPI. If I used the Windows Live Sign-in SDK to log in users, would I need any special licensing (cough cough...should read, would you be prepared to license access) or have you any web services available that clients can use to obtain information?

I am thinking of something like Live Writer for Channel 9. Do niners think this would be a waste of time?

I like it better with banana peppers and mayo on the side   = P~

You make me thinking about that ages-old telnet-based (now ssh-based) BBS. With the aid of link recognizing client like PCMan(PCManX for *nix based OS), it could be quite workable.

Good side:
The forum would be lightning fast even on cheap servers.
No more spamming bots posts... at least I haven't heard of anyone so boring and create spam bot for telnet-based BBSs.

Bad side:
You lose all the luxuries like Silverlight webcasts or so...
Lose the possibility of making the forum more user-interactive... (Also I don't think Channel 9 is heading this direction like Facebook)
Certain companies' firewall blocks everything except port 80 and 443, therefore would prevent some users (like me) accessing the website on office hours...
Designing good ASCII-Art logo would be a little challanging...

And anyway this approach does not look "cool". So no, I don't think we'll going back.

blowdart said:

You mean like the offline reader for the MS Communities forums?

I wonder whatever happened to that idea.

How about building a news server for the forum? Then everyone host their local news relay and use Outlook Express to access the forum through it? It could work too... (Just kidding )

I can recall some documentation for Channel 9 being posted here a while ago that detailed ways to interface with different functions of the site. It's a bit hard for me to remember but it exposed methods for things like posting and editing and the like (there were quite a lot).

I've tried to find it but haven't had much luck.

Anything to make this site faster is good with me.

The tought crossed my mind a couple of times too. I never did anything with it because I can't find any API documentation for C9 anywhere, but I like the idea.

Bas said:

The tought crossed my mind a couple of times too. I never did anything with it because I can't find any API documentation for C9 anywhere, but I like the idea.

If there is an API they can release, they should do a competition for a desktop reader\writer.

Are you listening Charles?


Herbie

EDIT: ANd the submissitons should, of course, all be open source projects on CodePlex ...

Dr Herbie said:

Bas said:

*snip*

If there is an API they can release, they should do a competition for a desktop reader\writer.

Are you listening Charles?


Herbie

EDIT: ANd the submissitons should, of course, all be open source projects on CodePlex ...

Sounds like a great plan!

Bas said:

Dr Herbie said:

*snip*

Sounds like a great plan!

http://channel9.msdn.com/Services/Posts.asmx

http://channel9.msdn.com/Services/Tags.asmx

ZippyV said:

Bas said:

*snip*

http://channel9.msdn.com/Services/Posts.asmx

http://channel9.msdn.com/Services/Tags.asmx

Gah! I knew it was here somewhere.

ZippyV said:

Bas said:

*snip*

http://channel9.msdn.com/Services/Posts.asmx

http://channel9.msdn.com/Services/Tags.asmx

It's simple enough to write an application that can read posts from Channel 9, but it's a read-only experience.  Being able to write content is a completely different matter...  their authentication system is undocumented.

CannotResolveSymbol said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

It's simple enough to write an application that can read posts from Channel 9, but it's a read-only experience.  Being able to write content is a completely different matter...  their authentication system is undocumented.

Charles did promise we would get web services for public usage before the end of 2005, so considering how well that worked out I think this will never become a reality.

seems like an ideal project for a silverlight app....  then it could work on a Mac, a PC, LInux etc... and could look nice with some xaml goodness ....

Charles said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

Be nice, man! Hey, we really wanted to expose services for 9. In fact, the dev team still wants to. Duncan/Erik/Samoy can share their thoughts on the matter. Me, I'll take the bullet for promising instead of agreeing in principle
C

I'll never let you forget that.

I know I can come across as overly critical sometimes, but remember it's because I love this site, so it pains me to see that it works so poorly 90% of the time (just this morning I had the old "Sign In is not a link" problem).

Sven Groot said:

Charles said:

*snip*

I'll never let you forget that.

I know I can come across as overly critical sometimes, but remember it's because I love this site, so it pains me to see that it works so poorly 90% of the time (just this morning I had the old "Sign In is not a link" problem).

Yeah, we *KNOW* what can be done with .net and such... so we get very frustrated when we see things not working right.
if we were not interested we would just walk away and say nothing ....
the very fact that we do complain shows that we really do care.

like the spam posts in tech-off that we no longer have a "This is spam" button for....