Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups

Whether reacting to user-input or handling responses from web services, Silverlight applications are typically asynchronous in nature. The framework provides UI control that fire events in response to user interactions, there are also classes like the DispatcherTimer and WebControl that perform some background work, firing events which are helpfully marshalled back onto the UI thread. However, Silverlight, and the other .NET UI frameworks, lack a way of orchestrating these asynchronous activities.

In this article I will look at how the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library provides a common interface for asynchronous events and actions giving  a consistent way to composite, orchestrate and marshal events between threads (and also have some fun creating a few cool mashups along the way!)

This article builds a couple of Rx powered Silverlight applications step by step, the final one being a Twitter / Bing Maps mashup that shows the location of snowfall in the UK based on users Tweets to the #uksnow hashtag.
 
 
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/ExploringRx.aspx