For Developers

Tell me about this project

BackgroundMotion is a community site built by Mindscape which allows users to share video and images for use with Windows Dreamscene. The site was originally the creation of Nigel Parker and Darryl Burling from Microsoft New Zealand, who envisioned a great community resource as well as a fully functioning site which could be used for learning.

We took an agile approach to the project which allowed us to balance a tight timeframe and the demand for features. The build itself took place over 3 weeks and was followed up by a series of technical presentations around New Zealand where we talked about some of the lessons that had been learned on the project and some of the tool and techniques that we used to achieve success.

We rounded out the project by creating videos and guidance to help you take what we have developed and use it as a learning tool to take your developments.

Happy coding!

How can I get started?

The best way to get started with BackgroundMotion is to download the source code and have a play with it yourself!
You can also look for the icon at the bottom of each page. Click it to view code snippets which show you how the page works.

We have also commented the source code to highlight practices we have used while building out the functionality. You can then combine this with the articles, videos and samples below on how to take the technologies used in BackgroundMotion and apply them more generally.

Where can I get the Source Code?

CodePlexCodePlex

You can download the Source Code for the project from our CodePlex project at http://www.codeplex.com/BackgroundMotion

How do I get my development environment set up?

To get started you will need:

  • Visual Studio 2005 Professional (or higher) SP1
  • An installed instance of SQL Server Express (or higher)
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0

Once you have downloaded an extracted the source code release, you will need to configure your solution and database. The instructions for this are described here.

What did you use to develop this site?

BackgroundMotion was developed using:

  • Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
  • ASP.NET 2.0
  • ASP.NET AJAX
  • LINQ May CTP
  • Web Client Software Factory (Composite Web Block)
  • Lucene.NET
  • NUnit

We had lots of fun developing BackgroundMotion and learned a lot along the way. To help share these learnings with you we have created a number of development resources which dive deeper into the technologies and approaches that we used.