Billboard is the demo application for .NET Services for Ruby. Billboard is a simple classified advertisement system that people can post advertisements, browse other advertisements, or search for advertisements.

Billboard was created to demonstrate usages of the .NET Services bus and message buffer. Billboard consists of three different parts that use the features of .NET Services to provide the complete application. First, is the Ruby on Rails web application that provides the core functionality of the application, which the user will see and interact with. Next is the SearchService, which is written in C#, and provides indexing and searching capabilities to the application. Finally, is a notification service which is written in Ruby, and provides the ability to send notifications to users utilizing the VMB feature of the .NET Service bus..

The diagram to the right shows a usage scenario for Billboard and how the application talks to the service. Note that all of the communication between the service and the application is handled by the bus.

The following sections will walk you through setting up an account in Billboard, to creating an advertisement, searching for that advertisement, and revoking that advertisement. In this walkthrough, you will gain insight into how the different parts of the application interact with each other using .NET Services and .NET Services for Ruby.

The first step is to create an accout on the Billboard site. Follow the link to register an account from the main page of the application, and fill out the form. This is where the first interaction between Billboard and the bus occurs. When you create an account, Billboard sends a message to the Billboard Notification system, via the bus, telling it to send you a confirmation email. You will receive this email from the notification service with a link to activate your account. You must click this link before you can log in to the system.

Once you have activated your account, you can log in. At this time, you can use the "My Profile" link to change your password or add an Information Card to your account.

To create an ad, simply click the 'Create Ad' link in the top menu bar and fill out the form on the next page. To delete your ad later, go to the view/edit page while logged in and the option to revoke the ad will be available.

Now that you've registered and created an ad, you can start to use the application to interact with the Service Bus. The search functionality in the application is a front end to a search service. The Search Service is written in C# on .NET, but is called using .NET Services for Ruby from the Ruby based application.

When the ad was created in the previous section, Billboard sent a notification to the SearchService to index the advertisement. When you search for your ad, the application sends your request to the SearchService which will search its index and reply with the list of advertisements that are a positive match.