Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Windows Phone Barcode Library (Silverlight C# ZXing Port)


I have been working on a Barcode Scanning application for Windows Phone 7 for about 3 months now, but none of my efforts would have been possible without the prior work done by Google on the open source ZXing (“Zebra Crossing”) barcode scanning library. This library is released under the Apache License v2.0 and has spurred development of many different barcode scanners on many different platforms. The idea for PhraseMeme Scanner came when I saw there weren’t any good scanners available for Windows Phone 7 and then stumbled across the partial C# port of ZXing. Through a bit of testing I was able to modify the library to support Silverlight and Window Phone 7, and decided I would help push the library into a well maintained and supported state in the Silverlight world.
While the primary purpose for updating the library is to build the "Best barcode scanning app available" I also want to give back to the community and help others create great windows phone or Silverlight apps. ZXing has their own Google Code project, but that site is mainly devoted to Android or Java development, so I decided to store the code on Codeplex to get it some .Net love. This also means that I can use Mecurial instead of SVN/CVS, which so far has been a great experience and should be very helpful if anyone else decides to contribute patches or new features to the library.
So without further ado, please check out the Windows Phone 7 Silverlight ZXing Barcode Scanning Library based on the csharp ZXing port created by Suraj Supekar at revision 1202 in the SVN repository. Let me know what you think, and happy coding!
Update 3/11/2011: It looks like the project is getting a lot of interest from developers with over 6,000 page views and 750 total downloads in the last few months. This is probably due to the various tweets on twitter and a blog post from Rudi Grobler about reading barcodes on WP7 using the Silverlight ZXing port. That blog post was mentioned on This Week in Channel 9, which totally made my day even if it was only talked about for 40 seconds and never even mentioned my name. Still… pretty wicked cool
Smile with tongue out

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