I've taken a short break on WoW. This last week I really didn't play the game that much. I did our 25m ICC run so the guild wouldn't have to find another healer. During this short break I missed a raid that I had "accepted" and if you play WoW then you know what that means. People were a little upset that I wasn't there. If you sign up for a raid you better be there. I thought I had accepted as "Tentative" which then it would have been OK. 

I wanted to be sure that I had access to this information easier without having to log into WoW. I thought it would be nice if I could add this to Outlook. Sure enough you can do exactly that. Take a look! The items in blue are my normal calendar and the items in green are on my WoW calendar. You can see the Midsummer Fire Festival at the top.

Now I will never miss a raid and I have my WoW calendar at my finger tips. How kewl is that? EPIC! More...

Here is my first Windows Phone 7 application! I really like to play a game called World of Warcraft. I figure it would be nice to create some applications for the Windows Phone that would be able to interact with the World of Warcraft universe. My first application will display the status of all the World of Warcraft realms (servers). Let’s step thought the different parts of the application.

The Realm Status Data

First thing we have to do is get the data that stores the realm status. This application will request the realm status from the World of Warcraft realm status page. The site is located on the realm status page. At first I thought I was going to have to parse the HTML page but after some investigation I found that the page simply displays an XML file. This is great news for parsing an XML file would be easy.

Getting the XML Data File

Getting the file should be very easy and it is. However it appears the communication model of the Windows Phone 7 is leaning toward a more asynchronous model. This means it will not be as simple as just saying give me the file and I’ll wait here until you get it. We will have to request the file and we will be alerted when the file arrives. I created a FileDownloader class to assist with getting the data file. Here is the code. More...