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Following on very nicely from my last post on deploying Silverlight content to your own production server , I'm pleased to announce that Silverlight Streaming has added full support for Silverlight 2 applications. As well as adding the basic support, the team have put a lot of work into simplifying the process of uploading and validating your application. Here's a basic walkthrough: Create your Silverlight 2 application using Visual Studio or Expression Blend, do all the usual test / debug steps, etc. Create a manifest file named manifest.xml, that describes how you want the control to be hosted. Here's a simple sample you can use as a template: < SilverlightApp > < version > 2.0 </ version > < source > PopTheBubble.xap </ source > < width > 400 </ width > < height > 300 </ height > < background > white </ background > < isWindowless > false </ isWindowless > </ SilverlightApp > Zip your application .xap Read More...
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Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn't require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS. But there's one little gotcha: web servers are typically configured to only serve up a limited set of known file extensions as static content. That's all well and good, but Silverlight introduces two new file extensions (.xaml for loose XAML files and .xap for the zip-based binary packaging format). As a result, you need to add the MIME types for those file extensions to your web server so that it recognizes Silverlight content appropriately. Here are the MIME types you need to add to the server configuration: Extension MIME Type .xaml application/xaml+xml .xap application/x-silverlight-app That's all you have to do. Unfortunately, it's not possible to provide generic instructions for how to add MIME types, as it varies from server to server, but here are Read More...
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Silverlight supports Windows Media Audio and Video (WMA, VC-1/WMV7-9) and MP3 formats. If you have existing media assets in other formats, you can convert them into a format Silverlight can understand. There are a couple ways to do this. On your desktop using Expression Encoder Use the user interface for granular control over the entire user experience on your media files with support for encoding, enhancement and publishing for Silverlight Or use the command line interface for batch processing Choose this when you do not have abundant bandwidth to upload media assets to Silverlight Streaming for encoding or transcoding Choose this if you have adequate CPU power on your desktop to transcode your assets Expression Encoder can upload your media files to the Silverlight Streaming service using this plug-in In the cloud using Silverlight Streaming The companion service to Silverlight on the cloud at http://silverlight.live.com/ provides transcoding support in the Video Management area Choose Read More...
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After three public preview releases, I'm proud to announce the final version of Video.Show , a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! You might be interested in Video.Show if: Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or external access; You're creating the next YouTube-style site and you want somewhere to start; You want to share home movies with your family and friends via your own personal site, rather than uploading them to somewhere public like YouTube or MSN Soapbox; You're running a conference or event and you want to make the materials available for anyone else to watch; You're a hosting provider and you want to offer your customers a way to store and share videos; You simply want to learn how to build a great AJAX web site experience with Microsoft technologies. We built Video.Show to enable all the above scenarios and many more! Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Read More...
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You may be pleased to know that we've just updated Video.Show with a bunch of changes. The 1.0 Release Candidate build is now available for your downloading pleasure from Codeplex. If you haven't seen Video.Show before, I'd encourage you to check it out. Vertigo (the company who we commissioned to build this) have a great web-site with further information and plenty of screenshots. Notable changes in the RC build include: Role management , allowing for hosted installations in which new users do not have upload rights. Users now fall into one of three categories: untrusted users (who can create comments but aren't able to upload videos); trusted users (who also have the "upload user" right), and an administrator role (who can manage other users' roles). This is built using the ASP.NET Membership technology. Basic debugging information is written to the database when video processing (encode, upload to Silverlight Streaming) fails. This is an interim solution; we have longer-term Read More...
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One of the favorite things about my job is being able to share really cool new content with you all, and so today is a good day to end the week on! Since we completed the Family.Show WPF reference sample, we've been working away in partnership with a great developer team from Vertigo Software on a Silverlight video scenario, and today is the day when we get to open it up to the developer community in the form of a first public beta. Video.Show is an end-to-end solution that provides a reference-quality sample for user-generated video content sites. Taking advantage of all of our latest technologies: .NET Framework 3.5 , ASP.NET AJAX , LINQ , Silverlight , Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming , Video.Show provides support for uploading, encoding, tagging, viewing and commenting on videos. Since not many people are building video sites like YouTube that have millions of videos, we've optimized the experience for sites with tens to thousands of videos. The version published today is Read More...
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Thanks to Adam Kinney (again!) for this awesome Halloween greetings card, brought to you by Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming. The full source code can be found on Adam's blog . Read More...
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Catherine Heller has written up a great post that describes a new feature in Silverlight Streaming. Having uploaded a Silverlight application to the Silverlight Streaming service, you can now embed it in any web page as an <iframe>. If you want to include a cool Silverlight gadget on your blog, but your blog engine doesn't support custom scripts or XAML files, this will work well. It's also perfect for a social networking site like Facebook , since you can create an application that hosts an <iframe>. Here's a little example that demonstrates this: All it took to embed this was one element: < iframe src ="http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/32/SlLogo/iframe.html" frameborder ="0" width ="258" height ="100" /> Of course, you're welcome to steal this one-liner to add some Silverlight "bling" to your own site :-) In the next post, I'll walk through a step-by-step guide to uploading an Expression Blend project to Silverlight Streaming. Read More...
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As we were pretty explicit in declaring at the MIX conference last month, one of the key scenarios for Silverlight 1.0 is delivering rich video experiences. But since the word "rich" is something of a cliché in the web world, I wanted to give a small example of what this means in reality. To include a video file in your Silverlight application, you simply add a line like the following within the XAML content: < MediaElement x:Name = " Video " Width = " 320 " Height = " 180 " Source = " sample.wmv " /> This creates a pretty raw player, but you can then add a custom skin for the player, along with event handlers to add playback control, handle download or buffering, adjust volume or balance, retrieve metadata, or trigger an action on a timeline marker being reached. If you happen to use Expression Media Encoder (currently a free beta) to re-encode your video file, you can have it automatically generate a skin based on a variety of templates - and indeed you can then use Expression Blend Read More...
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Arturo Toledo (one of our ace designers) posted a reminder on an internal email list that lynda.com have heaps of free training on Expression Blend and Expression Design available as screencasts. The Expression Blend material is presented by Lee Brimelow (author of the well known blog thewpfblog.com ) and progresses through from a basic overview of the tool to specific techniques for dealing with text, animation, 3D, media, layout, controls and data. There's just over sixty individual nuggets - Dr Sneath prescribes that you take two a day for a month and you'll feel great! I haven't looked so closely at the Expression Design material , but it's similarly comprehensive if the syllabus is to be believed. Ted LoCascio is the author of the six and a half hours of material available here. They also have paid-for material on many other topics, including Expression Web. My only frustration is that they missed a trick by producing the material in QuickTime format. Hopefully they'll see the light, Read More...
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Head over to silverlight.live.com to create yourself a Silverlight Streaming account key and begin uploading your Silverlight applications and media. Silverlight Streaming allows you to upload up to 4GB of media content, with videos of up to ten minutes in length. The storage is "in the cloud" and files are globally cached. Here's a rough and raw walkthrough of how you can use it: Grab yourself the trial edition of Expression Media Encoder ; Take a video and encode it - make sure you go to the Output tab and choose a player template; At the end of the encode process, you should have a directory that contains the media file, some XAML and JavaScript files and any thumbnails that you've specified through the Markers tool-window. You'll need to remove any .html, .aspx, .media, .csproj or .config files from the output directory. You won't need these for the Silverlight Streaming service. Then you'll want to add a manifest that describes the Silverlight application; for a default player from Read More...
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For the last few months, I've been featuring a portfolio of great WPF applications that have shipped since we launched WPF. We turned some of those, plus a bunch of new ones, into a keynote "anthem" video that Ray Ozzie just showed. I thought I'd upload it to the Silverlight Streaming service for ease of distribution and so that you see all those cool WPF applications one more time. Check it out here... Read More...
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