XBOX Friends List (Test Bed O' Fun)

Well, this is sort of turning into a project that gives me an opportunity to play with some technologies that I’ve either read about or seen and just haven’t had a reason to use them.

Tonight, I created a web-service to use in tangent with the application.  It will be able to show you whether or not your friends are running the app as well.  This way, you can see instantly if you jump on to Live that someone else that is running the app (and a friend) will probably see you and can follow suite.

I’ve also made progress on turning the custom user control that displays the friends list into more of a usable control rather than a static display.  You can now collapse/expend the Not Online friends and a scroll bar will become visible as expected (obviously, you can scroll the list).  Finally, the user control will modify the text values, trimming the values according to displayable area available and add … accordingly (much like Windows Messenger does.

I’m still considering using the application updater block, but don’t know whether or not it will be used… Since I’m using a web-service, I may just do a ‘new version is available’ type of message.

I’ll probably have a new version available sometime tomorrow night.