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My Personal Project - NFL Free Agency Movement

Its been awhile since I posted.  I haven't been sitting on my thumbs though.  I've been working on a personal project, NFL Free Agency Movement.  Anyone that knows me knows I'm a big sports guy, especially the NFL.  I'm also a big advocate of data visualization as seen by some of my posts.  Well, this lead to my side project. 

I wanted to do a visualization of NFL free agent movements between teams.  I've been kicking the idea around for awhile.  When Microsoft released the beta for Silverlight 2, I figured it was about time to take a crack at it while learning Silverlight 2.  The basic concept was to map players to teams through an input / output diagram.   The players on the left are players signed with the team, while the players on right are the ones that have left.

image

I also link the players to their profiles on Wikipedia to give a full background to them.

image

I also add some basic analytics to show players by conference, in division, offense/ defense,  and player ranking.  The data for the the application is pulled from open sources and press clippings.  The ratings are based on my experience and also information provided on public sites.  The data itself is stored in a simple XML document.  In another post, I'll go into details on the architecture, design, and the maintenance of the application.

I've certainly learned a lot about Silverlight 2 in building the application and hope others enjoy the application as much as I did in creating it.  I'll keep tweaking it over time.  I do have some know issues like the delay on loading when a team is selected in the list.  BTW, if you really want to see a massive overhaul of a team, click on Miami.  You can see Parcell's influence.

Posted: May 07 2008, 02:05 PM by tvanfleet | with 11 comment(s)
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Comments

POKE 53280,0: Pete Brown's Blog said:

My colleague at AIS , Tad VanFleet , just created a cool Silverlight 2 application for tracking NFL Free

# May 14, 2008 1:59 PM

Community Blogs said:

My colleague at AIS , Tad VanFleet , just created a cool Silverlight 2 application for tracking NFL Free

# May 14, 2008 2:49 PM

ASP.NET Debugging said:

This is a really cool application that shows off the power of Silverlight 2.0.  You can use this

# May 14, 2008 5:05 PM

Ryan said:

I was interested to see the the wikipedia web page displayed in silverlight. How do you do that?

# May 15, 2008 9:49 AM

tvanfleet said:

For the wiki page i wanted the page to be able to scale like the silverlight app itself.  

The way I ended up being able to do it is, its actually an image.  I have an aspx page that takes a parameter for the url you want to capture and it creates an image of it.  In the silverlight app I use the image control with the url set to the aspx page.

Using this method I get the latest page and it can scale.

# May 15, 2008 2:48 PM

Community Blogs said:

Hanu Kommalapa on Silverlight for the Enterprise, Joel Neubeck on Circular Collision Animation, O'Reilly's

# May 15, 2008 4:33 PM

Silverlight articles and demos wrap-up for the last 3 days said:

Pingback from  Silverlight articles and demos wrap-up for the last 3 days

# May 16, 2008 9:59 AM

Frank La Vigne said:

# May 16, 2008 1:45 PM

T Rob said:

Any chance in viewing the source code?

# June 25, 2008 9:25 AM

DEVELOPMENT SITE - NOT MY PUBLIC BLOG said:

My colleague at AIS , Tad VanFleet , just created a cool Silverlight 2 application for tracking NFL Free Agent movement. Tad is on our BI/Data Visualization team, and has shown a strong interest in, and skill with, Silverlight 2. One of the earliest demos

# June 29, 2008 12:01 AM

... said:

Dies ist ein gro�er Ort. Ich m�chte hier noch einmal.

# March 7, 2009 11:34 AM
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