You may heard about the Pivot control that helps us to provide statistical representation of some products. The combination of Pivot, Silverlight, and your websites will create unique and diverse experiences all over the web. As a developer, you can create collections of your own. New collections can be created with no code – they’re only data. It’s all based on special collections with some sort of XML mark-up. But it’s not the only solution.
Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework It’s an extensible Web Analytics Framework for Microsoft Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone 7 Applications. Hosted on CodePlex. Main idea is based on creation of endpoints for each service that you want to use.
It provides:
- Out-of-browser scenarios
- Offline scenarios
- Multiple analytics services simultaneously without impacting performance
- Support for designers in Microsoft Expression Blend to add tracking to applications without coding
- A/B Testing
- SketchFlow Prototypes
- Logging of video experiences with the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework
- Includes analytical services for >10 popular companies (like Google Analytics and WebTreands). Whole list available at the official page.
- Supports a lot of (or maybe all) famous user interface controls.
For example. ComponentOne Silverlight 4 controls have exposed event handlers to work with the Silverlight Analytics Framework EventTrigger and TrackAction objects. Using these event handlers, users of ComponentOne Silverlight controls can pass additional, useful information to the analytics providers for the events they wish to track, such as the C1DataGrid’s SelectionChanged event. No changes in code or markup are required for existing ComponentOne controls when adding Analytics support to Silverlight applications.
We are adding interaction and connecting SelectionChanged event to the TrackAction. To understand it it’ better to try it yourself. With MSAF you can create a cloud endpoint with Silverlytics.
Silverlytics is a Microsoft Azure-based endpoint for the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF). This uses the Service Oriented Analytics Behavior in the analytics framework to send data to the Azure-based endpoint. The framework provides analytics capabilities to the latest web technologies (think Silverlight) that might not work with pixel or javascript-based tracking tags commonly used in traditional HTML web applications. Based on the scalability and availability requirements of any good analytics platform, Microsoft Azure provides the perfect cloud-based solution. Silverlytics takes advantage of several Azure technologies to capture and store the vast amounts of collected data. Surfacing the analytics data is done with Microsoft Pivot. Pivot is an experimental application from Microsoft Labs that provides a low-friction way to visualize the analytics data in real-time.
You can view the example through the Pivot Viewer by typing this URL: http://www.silverlytics.com/pivot/demo.cxml
Currently beta version for free registration is available. You will perform few steps to use it on your web site. Be aware that this service is connected with the website as Bing service.
Depending on your implementation of the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF), you can implement the endpoint of your account in two ways:
Option 1 – Supply data to the endpoint using a REST-based call, like this…
http://silverlytics.cloudapp.net/SOA/1.0?ai=100046...
Option 2 – If you are using the XAML markup portrayed in many of the MSAF samples, it should look like this..
... ...
Once you begin pushing data into the system, you can use the Microsoft Pivot tool to immediately begin analyzing the results. After launching the pivot tool, use the URL http://silverlytics.cloudapp.net/pivot to browse your collection. You will be prompted for your credentials – just use the same username and password that you use when accessing their site. You can allow additional user access to this account. This allows different users to analyze the data for their own purposes.
One more thing can help in analysis. Infragistics Analytics Framework.This project includes wrappers for the Infragistics controls that integrate with the recently launched Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. There is a test web site, a dashboard to display analytics metrics, and wrappers for Infragistics Silverlight controls. There is well-formed documentation and sample project on it’s official site.
Hope all this will help to create a fine data representation for Silverlight applications.