One of the easiest ways to develop against the Webtrends DX Web Services is to use the Webtrends.SDK Assembly.  The Webtrends SDK handles all of the retrieval of profile & report listings, report objects, mappings into DataTable, Object, or other formats, and authentication.  The SDK cuts down on about 50-80% of the code one needs to write to retrieve and process the returned report data.  Development is always moving forward to add functionality, processing, more mappings, and other features to the SDK to simplify and speed development.  Here are some samples of the current key parts of the SDK Library.

The Business Objects

The business objects provided in the Webtrends SDK are used to map the retrieved data into.  These object include the following key classes (not all are included, it is a pretty long list):

The engineering group at work got v9.0 up and live.  If you have an account you can check it out at http://insight.webtrends.com.  Props out to Justin, Rob, Joel, James, Adam, David and the whole crew working on the release.  Great job!

Here’s a few of the new bits that really provide some great insight (pun intended?) into activity on a site.  In this case I’m comparing the profile I have setup for Loosely Coupled Human Code Factory.

(Click on the larger for a full screen shot of the image).

In the image I have the red arrows pointing at the RSS feed, which is actually an existing feature, but this is a perfect example of wiring in an RSS feed so one can see the effects of the entry?s increase in hits after posting.  In addition looking a little further back on the graph you can see where the blog experienced a decrease after a posting.  Looking at the grey bars, which represent weekends, one can see that posting a blog entry on Friday or Saturday usually makes for bad readership, especially on a tech blog like this.  But posting on a Monday, Tuesday, or even Wednesday usually bodes well for readership.

In this image I’ve shown what clicking to add a Note looks like.  Adding Notes is a new feature.  Just hover over the Notes bar on the left hand side and click on the + that appears.  It will show this modal focused window as the image shows.  Enter the information for the note and set the date & time, if it is for a global setting or the current profile and the privacy setting.  Once done just click on save.

As you can see, the note now shows up as A on the chart.  In the display below the note text shows.

This is a great way to put markers into charts to show significant events such as a product release or something similar that would cause an increase or decrease in visitors, visits, or other measure.

This image shows the Twitter Feed I have, that I often associate links with to this blog or others.  I started tracking it to show the tweets in the description area and to see when a particular tweet or link posting increases views of the particular link posted.

That is my quick multi-second tour of the new Webtrends Insight interface, hope you enjoyed.  Hopefully I?ll have more to post real soon so keep an eye on this blog and the Webtrends’ Developers’ Blog for DX and DC.

Tonight PADNUG has Kelly White doing a presentation on MVVM.  That?s Model View View-Model, and looks to be an interesting presentation.  Kelly?s been working with MVVM for some time now so I?m sure it?ll be an interesting presentation.  I think I myself might even throw some questions his way.  So be sure to swing out to the west side for the presentation.  For more information check out the meeting information.

Ok, I have some cool code bits, announcements, and other such things.  Some of the code bits will be here "Developer Document", the blog entry for the first example I've written up is here "SDK, ADO.NET DataTable/DataSet, and Code Bits", and then of course the regular sundry of my writings.

There has been an on and off demand internally for some additions to the Webtrends SDK for our DX Web Services offerings, so I added some bits.  The following are a list of the features:

• Map to DataTable/DataSet from Data Transfer Object.  Alright, I'm going to do a little explaining on this topic.  The DataTable is the standard, years old ADO.NET DataTable that someone can put in with other DataTables in the DataSet.  It basically provides the data pulled from the DX web services in a flattened easy to use DataTable format.
• Profile & Report Listing Factory.  I added a profile and report listing factory for pulling lists from the DX web services.  This seemed like a no brained, it just needed to be available.
• I also refactored the Report Factory Methods to accept a string or Uri Object Parameter to retrieve a report from.  This way, if another tool creates a Uri then it can be used directly instead of parsing it apart only to hand of the values to have the factory parse it back together.
• Last but not least, available in bite size assembly format.  Check out the Webtrends Developers' Website for the bits.

This is a serious smackdown ad, I LOVED it.  I’ve been pondering dropping the iPhone as it has never felt robust, but the Windows Mobile was just a disgrace.  Now though, WOW!  Between the ad & the seriousness of Android coming to other phone platforms I am honestly getting pretty stoked.  The development environments are better (I mean, Object C, come on), there are multiples to choose from, the platform is open.  Sounds like Windows stomping Macintosh those years ago.  Cept’ this time it is Google vs. Apple.  It is about time this battle got real!!  I’m looking forward to it with bated breath.  🙂

So with that, it just kicked off the motivation to start doing some real Mobile Dev.  Yes, I will probably get some iPhone Apps built, but my focus will definitely be Android.