Beyond TV SDK addition for developers

[DaWanderer]

I put together this library to ease my own Beyond TV development as well as help out other developers. The library accomplishes two things:

1. All Beyond TV 3.5 web services classes have been implemented. The libraries automatically connect to "localhost", so you can only run them from the local machine. Having these classes removes the necessity of adding web references and changing namespaces as shown in the SDK tutorials.

2. A helper class for property bags has been added. The PVSPropertyBag is very cumbersome to work with. My PropertyBagHelper class allows you to address properties by name, have multiple values for a given property name, copy in and out of PVSPropertyBags, add new properties easily, remove properties by name, and make sure only one value exists for a given property. There are also some utility functions to easily copy property bags and filter properties into a new property bag.

The entire Visual Studio.NET 2003 solution is included in the ZIP file. Feel free to use the source code for whatever you want. The actually .NET assembly is located in the bin\Release folder (BeyondTVLibrary.dll).

Let me know if there are any problems or features anyone would like added.

[DaWanderer]

Almost forgot to mention....make sure you add a reference to System.Web.Services when you reference BeyondTVLibrary.dll. Otherwise you'll get an error about SoapHttpblahblah not being defined.

[merrypig]

Just a tip; you could implement the classes such that you can specify the url/port to be used by the web reference dynamically. Say, pass it in the constructor of the class and have it fill out the .url property of the btv class before connecting.

[DaWanderer]

I have made the requested changes. You can now supply any Beyond TV web service object with a hostname-port pair, an IPAddress-port pair, or an IPEndPoint.

[jmaver]

This is great. I started on something like this, but never cleaned it up. I scrapped mine and started using yours instead.
Thanks.

[DaWanderer]

Glad to help out the community

[Fonceur]

Thanks, your library makes accessing the BTV server much less cumbersome than the SDK tutorial!

[DaWanderer]

I've made a minor update to the library. I added a GetPropertyNames function to the PropertyBagHelper to let you easily get a list of all the property names in the bag.

[bshinkle]

Nicely done! Much better than the setup from the tutorial..

[bshinkle]

Does this have to be rebuilt when new releases of BTV come out? I am not seeing various methods listed in the API docs, like BTVGuideData.GetEpisodesByFilters, SearchByTitle2, and others.. Or are the API docs on code.snapstream.com just out of date?

[DaWanderer]

This library was built against BTV 3.5, so the new APIs from 3.7 aren't in there.

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by DaWanderer

This library was built against BTV 3.5, so the new APIs from 3.7 aren't in there.

Any chances of you rebuilding your great library for BTV 4.0?

[DaWanderer]

Well, I'd have to buy BTV 4 first Is it good enough to upgrade?

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by DaWanderer

Well, I'd have to buy BTV 4 first Is it good enough to upgrade?

Kind of a chicken and egg problem here... I have not upgraded to BTV 4.0 yet because of the bug fix that resulted in duplicate copies of the same show being recorded on different channels, rather then just recording the first showing. So I would want to work around their bug fix, yet I do not want to be stuck in version 4 if I cannot get a working solution...

[jmaver]

Any updates to this? DaWanderer, did you ever update?