Tankster Fan Site Demo @ //BUILD/

During today’s //build/ 2011 keynote Scott Gu delighted the audience with a Web, Server and Cloud demo that showed how easy it is to quickly code up an application (“Tankster Fan Site”) that takes advantage of the next version of the Web Platform, including new Server/Cloud technology.

For the scenario, we helped Drew Robbins to extend the Tankster Social Game (tankster.net) shown by Jason Zander and built using the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games. Using new mobile support built-in ASP.NET MVC4 and jQuery Mobile for cross-devices (iPhone/iPod/WP7), Scott demonstrated how to make the Game Ranking “mobile friendly” without writing much code.

The solution also takes advantage of the new Web Sockets support on most modern Web Browsers to enable in-game chat and event notifications that enables users to play the game while also chatting with, or cheering for, their favorite players.

The application was created using Visual Studio 11 Preview and the C# 4.5 Async API, providing screaming performance consuming the Tankster Web Services and enabling up to twice the number of requests per second by using the magic keyword-pair of async/await.