Silverlight Planning Poker Timer
The other day I was searching for a small project to get started with Silverlight 2 development.
In my today’s works at Innoveo Solutions I am spending quite some time evangelizing about Scrum framework. I found some time ago the Planning Poker Timer by Aslak Hellesøy. That’s definitely looks like a great project to implement with Silverlight 2.
So my goal is as the following:
- A full re-implementation of the Planning Poker Timer using Silverlight 2 and C#
- You can set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
- Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
- Make the colours start at blue, go red at 4 seconds and black at 0 seconds or use your imagination to let people know time is running out
- You can make the timer restart automatically at a certain time. Hitting the spacebar will also restart the timer (and make all of this text go away)
- Use it to keep folks focussed on time in other situations - like lightning talks, where you can use these settings
- Make the text bigger to fill the whole screen. This is CMD+ or CTRL+ in most browsers - or via the menu if you're using IE
- Turn the Silverlight Planning Poker Timer to a Vista Gadget
So I fired up Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and created a first very simple project with two TextBlock and used it in Visual Studio 2008.
After less than one hour I was able to:
- Set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
- Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
- Go full screen
It is really impressive at which speed you can start to handle a project in Silverlight 2 with some .NET backgound. It was really clever from Microsoft to give the same development environment on the client that you have on the server side.