MIX 10 Schedule Viewer – WinMo Widget & oData FTW!

Since building a Windows Mobile 6.5 MIX10 Twitter Widget was relatively easy, I decided to take on a bigger challenge, building a Schedule Viewer for MIX.  Why should the iPhone and MonoFolks have all the fun?  This widget is available on Windows Marketplace for Mobile. You can download the source here.

My first task was to identify a source of the schedule data, after a little scouting around I found that MIX published there schedule data via an oData feed.  You can read about the API here.  Once I figured that out it was a simple matter of pulling the JSON from the oData feed and then use jQuery to build up our screens, in total I have about 6-8 hours into this app, most of that was figuring out oData and the exact structure of the data.

Here are some highlights of the app

1. To figure out the data structure I used Fiddler to monitor the calls with oData.
2. After looking at the response text, I used JSON viewer to see the actual nodes of the data.
3. It looks like there might be a bug in the serialization of dates.  JSON Serialization should send the number of milliseconds since 1/1/1970 UTC.  It looks like the JSON serializer used for this feed sends the number of milliseconds since 1/1/1970 PST.
4. To get a better idea of how the oData queries are structured take look the source code.
5. If you copy these files to your local web server, you should be able to run the widget in IE7.0+

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me

-twb