For those of you who are into kinky stuff I made a simple, more of a proof of concept, application that sits in Widnows taskbar and shows the order info in balloon popup. Took me little more than half of hour to get this working. Almost forgot how great C# is

Magento has this great feature, rss feed for orders. You can access it via link http://myshopsite/rss/order/new. It requires authentication, so you need to provide Magento user and pass to access this link. Idea I wanted to play around was how to get this info in my windows app. It’s really, really simple. Below is the screenshot of this little app for you to see what I’m talking about.

And here is the application it self  simpleorderpreview and full source code (Visual Studio 2008 Express C#, entire solution project) acmnewproducts.

When you un-archive  files from simpleorderpreview there is only one thing you need to do prior to running .exe file. You need to open ACMNewProducts.exe.config and set username, password and url of your own Magento shop. That’s it. Now you can run the app.

One click on Magento icon inside the taskbar executes show order process, while double cliking the icon closes the application.

I will not go into the details in this post on how this works. Basicaly it’s simple XML parser. Most important part is the HTTP authentification, which you can see in code source code.

Hope you find this usefull, something to play with.