I Have Added a New and Useless Feature to the Site

Regular visitors may have noticed a new feature on the details page for articles, news and other categories of the site. The Details section of the page now has a Listened To item.

This item will display the song (and album) I was listening to while I was writing the article, FAQ, news item or snippet, and it looks like this:
Pretty useless, don't you think? To make it even more useless, the information is also available for currently playing tracks through a web service. You'll find the service here: http://imar.spaanjaars.com/WebServices/PublicContent.asmx. The are a few methods available, like NowPlayingGetDataSet (returns the track info as a DataSet) and NowPlayingGetString (returns the data as a simple string). You can test it out using the Invoke button on the test page for the service.

If you want to find out the gory details of the application, be sure to check out this article. The short version is that I have used some Windows handle stuff in C# to get at the WinAmp window, retrieve the file name and path of the currently playing track, and then use an ID3 reader and static methods from the File class to validate the file and retrieve information from it.
The results of this data retrieval is saved in a text file that can be read by the Web service. This service, in turn, caches the information and uses a CacheDependency that points back to the file with the track info.
The application runs as a Windows service, and polls the WinAmp window once in a while (somewhere between 10 and 100 seconds, depending on its mood).

Although the application's usage is rather limited, it was a nice exercise that used a few interesting technologies like Windows Services, Windows Handles, ID3 tags reading, Web Services and Caching.

If you have more ideas for this feature, let me know.


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QuickDocId265
Full URLhttp://imar.spaanjaars.com/265/i-have-added-a-new-and-useless-feature-to-the-site
Short cuthttp://imar.spaanjaars.com/265/
Written byImar Spaanjaars
Date Posted04/07/2004 00:31
Date Last Updated04/27/2004 12:44
Date Last Reviewed 12/06/2006 15:14
Listened to when writing Kruder & Dorfmeister / Boogie Woogie by Kruder & Dorfmeister (Track 5 from the album: The K&D Sessions CD2)