Station.ru - online radio out of browser on Silverlight

At the opening of the Platform 2010 conference, we showed Station.ru , a new QuantumArt development for the Russian Media Group . This is a single entry point for popular holding radio stations - Russian Radio, Radio Maximum, DFM and others.

In addition to traditional listening to radio online, the site has an interesting player that allows you to customize the music for yourself and make your own radio station. You can set your current mood, the desired tempo, timbre and popularity of the music - and the site will select a playlist specifically for you.

The most interesting thing is that this player can be run outside the browser - thanks to the capabilities of Silverlight 3. Just go to http://station.ru/desktopand click the “Install Player on Computer” button! The application has an icon on the desktop, a place on the taskbar, its own window in the OS (Windows or Mac OS), but at the same time it is the same Silverlight application as in the browser. That is, when developing such a solution, you do not need to create a separate project, conduct it in parallel, do separate product support, and so on. Plus, users only need Silverlight to start (as in the browser) and that's it!

In addition to the interesting scenario and ease of development, it is important to note a big plus for users - how often did you accidentally close the browser when playing music in one of the tabs? In this case, there are simply no such problems - the application launches separately.

More detailed information on developing non-browser applications on Silverlight is available in a specially online report on TechDays.