Wikipedia Explorer 

Description:
In conjunction with Microsoft developer and platform evangelism team in Redmond and Monochrome, Dot Net Solutions has released a new version of its Wikipedia Explorer built on top of Windows Azure.

Those acquainted with the original version of Wikipedia Explorer will be familiar with the concept - for those that are not, it is about visualising relationships between documents within Wikipedia - creating a new browsing experience in Windows Presentation Foundation.

 
In the original version all the data was downloaded from Wikipedia on the fly. This was very simple, but also very slow and meant different visualisations would be produced each time based on which links were downloaded first.

Wikipedia does have a database dump available which contains a complete snapshot of the whole site however. The problem is the dump is enormous. Converting from wikicode (the proprietary format it is stored in) to XML/XAML is very processor intensive. On a single high-powered server it would take somewhere in the region of 4-6 months to complete. This was a non starter.

By building the application on top of Windows Azure we could scale this process out to a large number of servers. It currently runs on 50 server instances. The same process that would have taken up to 6 months took a little over 4 days – almost exactly 1/50th the time, demonstrating the power of the Azure Services platform, it is easy to scale out processor intensive tasks and have them complete much faster by provisioning more hardware.

Wikipedia Explorer is currently featuring in the keynote of the MSDN Developer Conference road show across America.

You can try Wikipedia Explorer for yourself here: