Well it turns out Twitter just turned off allowing anyone from accessing their site via cross domain requests because of a security hole that was found.  It sounds like they're going to be doing some good things to enable access to their api through cross domain requests but it's going to take a little while.  For the time being I'll probably add a proxy to my own site so I can continue to play around with Silverlight.  It is pretty amazing that literally the day that I try and use Twitter's api via Silverlight they turned off outside access.  For those interested they're going to be doing the following within the next month:

1. Move the Twitter API to api.twitter.com.  Use the completely permissive crossdomain.xml on api.twitter.com.

2. Stop supporting HTTP Basic auth. on api.twitter.com.  Implement OAuth or some other kind of auth. token system.

3. Require non-public API requests to include a valid user auth. token.

All three items were recommended by some chap named Dossy on the Twitter Development Google Talk Group.  On a side note OAuth seems to be gaining some traction and definitely needs some more of my attention.

Last week I started having a bunch of problems when visiting some of my favorite sites.  Certain sites would freeze up both Firefox and Safari when I visited.  Since I hadn't had any problems with these sites for as long as I could remember and hadn't updated my browsers lately I was confused about what migh tbe going wrong.  After a couple days of getting annoyed and having to restart my browsers I had a revelation.  I had recently installed Silverlight 2 Beta 1, and all the sites I was visiting had flash on their homepage.  It turns out that something with Silverlight 2 made it so flash broke.  I ended up manually uninstalling Silverlight, restarting, and all was good again.

Tonight I decided that it was time that I checkout the Silverlight 2 beta release.  There are a number of things that I want to try with Silverlight, unfortunately, a bunch of other work has been keeping me.

I decided that the best way to get started would be with a real simple client.  Creating a simple silverlight control for showing recent tweets from Twitter seemed like it would be a fun experiment.  To get started I wanted to download some tweets from Twitter and show them in a ListBox.  Since LINQ to XML can be used with Silverlight 2, I figured the process would be pretty painless.  Of course I forgot about the fact that everyone had to go and try and make everything on the web secure.  From what I can tell, the fact that Twitter doesn't have, or has recently botched, their cross domain policy file is preventing me from being able to make any progress on my little silverlight project. 

Hopefully I'll figure out what the deal is with Twitters cross domain policy file.  It might be that I have something botched since when I run ScottGu's Digg sample I get the same "Download failure" that I get when attempting to download XML from Twitter.

UPDATE: Well it looks like the problem is that Twitter's cross domain policy file only allows *.twitter.com and *.discoveringradiance.com.  That sucks.  I guess accessing the XML directly from Twitter is out of the question.

One of the things that I've missed about using FeedDemon as my RSS Newsreader is the ability to sync my unread items locally and read them while offline.  Since my current RSS Reader is a web app, Google Reader, I had accepted the fact that syncing unread items to read on the train ride home or elsewhere was something I would have to live without.  Apparently, I'm not very forward thinking because with Google Gears I can now sync locally and use Google Reader while offline!  In fact, with Google Gears, any web app can now add offline support and thus open a whole new world of possibilities.  Gears provides a client side relational database that can be accessed via Javascript.  Under the covers Gears uses SQLite.

What's even more interesting is the thought of how Microsoft might respond, or perhaps how they've already responded.  Imagine being able to write Silverlight applications in managed code, ruby, or whatever language tickles your fancy and persist data to a local SQL Server Compact edition using the common ADO.NET programming paradigms that we're all used to.  Next imagine ADO.NET Synchronization Services thrown into the mix so that local data in the SQL Server compact edition database can be synced back to the server. 

While the advancements made by Google Gears excites me, I'm not real big on being limited to programming against it with javascript.  The idea of building web apps that can now work offline, and use local databases that can sync back with the data center using Sync Services, all within the nice managed environment provided by Silverlight would be a sweet deal.  Heck, even if that doesn't happen we should be able to write a managed wrapper on top of Google Gears so that our managed code within Silverlight can take advantage of it.

Back in February I posted about when the right time for a new technology is.  As some likely guessed after seeing my review of Everyday Scripting with Ruby and the list of books that were on my next up list I decided to go with Rails as my new technology for one of the projects.  In a future post I'll detail how I've found the experience, and how it compares to .NET land but that's for another day.  Today, I'd like to point out the fact that nobody writes anything cool in .NET.  At least nobody writes any of the cool stuff that I need in .NET.  Ok, perhaps I'm exagerating a bit....in actuality the fact is that nobody writes social network visualization libraries in .NET. :)  The project that I'm working on that's using Rails involves social networks.  One of the things that I'll be getting to shortly is the actual visualization part of the project.  What I'd really love is if someone would write something as cool as this, in Silverlight.   That way I could have my Rails application call .NET code.  What could be better to piss off the Rails purists?  Afterall, I'm supposed to have given up all things .NET by now and truelly converted to Rails, right?  Ok, moving on....who wants to write prefuse in Silverlight?  It'd be a killer demo application to show off the capabilities of Silverlight and would undoubtedly make it so the only RIA platform anyone chooses is Silverlight.  Flash who?  Java FX what?  Flex...I think not.  With prefuse.NET, Silverlight is guaranteed instant mass approval.  Or maybe it'll just make me happy that I get to write .NET code that will access a RESTful Rails service for data that lives inside a rhtml page.  Either way you win, right?

In all seriousness I think Silverlight would be a great technology for building web based network visualization software.  While there's no way I'll have time to write something as fully functional as I'll need, I think I'll apply the learn a new technology even if it will take longer rule and give getting a basic network visualization demo in Silverlight working.  Luckily, I think some of the Silverlight samples (such as this one) might get me moving in the right direction.  If anyone cares to lend a hand, give me a shout!  Instance fame and fortune is within your grasp!