Michael S. Scherotter

Michael Scherotter's Synergist Blog So Google made a big announcement last week about OpenSocial.  I saw that as something very interesting because, as I read about it, it became more and more clear that it was really something big. I have always been a proponent of open standards in software especially with coming from Mindjet with its open file format and working with the Open XML file formats. In my opinion they seem to work best when crafted by a single entity and then opened up to the world, not designed by committee.  That's what I see now with OpenSocial.  Google with its Orkut online community (a closed-source ASP.Net application) created an API for social applications so that developers can build applications that can then run inside other social networking applications. They then opened up the specification for that API to other social networking applicat... (more)

How OpenSocial Complements Silverlight

Michael Scherotter's Synergist Blog Over the weekend, my challenge was to learn about OpenSocial and create a Silverlight application that uses it. I did that, with this simple application. To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google Gadget with the OpenSocial feature, post the gadget on the Internet, and then add the URL of the gadget as an application.  As I looked into the Google gadget API to build this, I found something interesting, the Google Gadget framework exposes the function _IG_FetchContent() that can be used to as... (more)