Jit Ghosh's WebLog

Silverlight Developer Vacancy at a Microsoft Media Service Partner – Interested ?

Jit Ghosh — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:07:09 GMT

A premium media service partner Origin Digital ( http://www.origindigital.com ) who I work with regularly is looking for a contracting position to be filled right away in northern NJ. They require superior Silverlight development skills. If interested...(read more)

TimeCode Ranges from Windows Media Metadata

Jit Ghosh — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:46:23 GMT

As a follow up to my previous post , I have updated the code to add the ability to extract SMPTE timecode ranges. The WMMetadataReader class (in WMMetadataReader.h) now has a public method like below: System::Collections::Generic::List<SMPTETimeCodeRange...(read more)

2nd Edition of our Silverlight Recipes book is now available…

Jit Ghosh — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:36:50 GMT

Rob and I worked hard on updating this for SL 3. If you do happen to purchase it, please let us know if you like the format, the topics and any thoughts on how we can improve. We are about to start early work on the next edition for Silverlight...(read more)

Windows Media Metadata in Managed Code (and by extension - Silverlight)

Jit Ghosh — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:34:00 GMT

I have encountered several inquiries about accessing the metadata embedded in Windows Media file headers from Silverlight. Unfortunately Silverlight does not expose this information out of the box. The only way you can access this is by utilizing the...(read more)

IIS Media Services 3.0 Released!!

Jit Ghosh — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:56:12 GMT

The IIS Media Services team just released the IIS Media Services 3.0 suite of technologies. This is pretty big release for us – with Live Smooth Streaming possibly being the coolest part of it. If you are watching the NBC Sunday Night Football on the...(read more)

Silverlight 3 is now officially released!!

Jit Ghosh — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:25:49 GMT

WooHoo!! Go read more about it in Scott’s blog here . I will be positing my own experiences and thoughts in the coming days. Learn more and download at http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ Enjoy!!...(read more)

Architect Council Webcasts

Jit Ghosh — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:50:11 GMT

The Microsoft Patterns & Practices team, in collaboration with members of the Microsoft Developer Evangelism team (my uber team that is) is putting together a series of webcasts titled “Pragmatic Patterns for Architects” . I would vote “must attend...(read more)

MTV & Silverlight 3 at NAB 2009

Jit Ghosh — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:37:02 GMT

NAB 2009 rocked !! It was exhausting working the booth, standing on my feet all day, talking to so many people over the course of four days, but it was so exciting at the same time. We showed many cool things at the Microsoft booth, including Silverlight...(read more)

Binding an embedded image using a value converter

Jit Ghosh — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:52:35 GMT

Recently I needed to bind some embedded images to data templates. If you look at the Image type in Silverlight 2, you will see that it exposes a Source property of type ImageSource that can be set to the URI of an image either relative to the XAP, or...(read more)

Open position in our team..

Jit Ghosh — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:14:39 GMT

Our team (Developer & Platform Evangelism for Communications, Media & Entertainment) is looking to hire a person in the role of a Platform Strategy Advisor. A PSA is a very exciting, highly visible, and influential role within the team and the...(read more)

Back to blogging - my book and other news…

Jit Ghosh — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:29:11 GMT

I have been inconspicuously absent on blogosphere for a while now. For my handful readers – I hope you missed me :-). I am back to blogging and hope to put out some more interesting stuff for you guys in the coming weeks. First for exciting news. We are...(read more)

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is now available !!

Jit Ghosh — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:08:00 GMT

Woo - Hoo!! Navigate over to http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ to download the freshly minted beta 2 bits including the runtime, the SDK, and the Visual Studio 2008 tools for Silverlight 2 development. There is also a brand new version of Blend 2...(read more)

Broken link to attachment fixed for previous post

Jit Ghosh — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 07:18:00 GMT

Sone folks pointed that the code sample attachment in my previous post on the Async Multiple File Upload Control for Silverlight 2 was broken. I have fixed it in the post as well provided a link below to the code on my Windows Live SkyDrive. http:...(read more)

Async Multi File Upload Control with Metadata support for Silverlight 2 (Beta 1)

Jit Ghosh — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:43:00 GMT

By now a lot of you must be having a lot of fun of Silverlight 2 Beta 1. If you have not downloaded, installed and played with SL 2 Beta 1, I urge you do it right away - you are missing out!!! You can download SL2 here . I have been working on a number...(read more)

Slides and Demos from Developer Days, March 13th in New York

Jit Ghosh — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:22:15 GMT

I recently gave two presentations at one of our events in New York - one on WPF and one on Silverlight 2. A lot of folks asked me to make the slide decks and the code demos available. So here they are (zipped) - you can download them from my Windows Live...(read more)

WPF based Music CD Ripper

Jit Ghosh — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 04:13:00 GMT

One of the WPF based projects I am working on right now needs some functionality to enable ripping music CD's a la Windows Media Player. I was digging into the various Windows Media SDK's as well as the Media Foundation stuff in Windows Vista to find...(read more)

WPF Control Templates - An Overview

Jit Ghosh — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 03:01:51 GMT

In several of my discussions with customers around WPF in the recent past, I got asked a bunch of questions around Control Templating. Most of them can be summarized to one - "how do control templates work". Control Templating is fairly fundamental...(read more)

New Drops for ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions CTP and Entity Framework Beta

Jit Ghosh — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:41:10 GMT

Scott Guthrie announced a CTP release for ASP.Net Extensions available for public download. Lots of exciting features that you can play with, including the new ASP.Net MVC Framework, as well as the Entity Framework. ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions CTP MVC Toolkit...(read more)

Great article on Communications As A Service

Jit Ghosh — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 05:58:12 GMT

It is becoming increasingly obvious that designing telecommunication architectures in a service oriented way actually makes a lot of sense. Joe Hofstader, another Architect on our team, has tons of experience building service based solutions for...(read more)

.NET Product Roadmap Announcements

Jit Ghosh — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 05:48:22 GMT

If you have seen Scott Guthrie's recent post on the .Net Web Product roadmap , also check out my team mate Harry Mower's post . Harry adds some more information about the impact of the roadmap on media serving, specifically highlighting features...(read more)

Demo Live Streams in Silverlight

Jit Ghosh — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 22:12:00 GMT

Customers that I demonstrate Silverlight to, often ask me about Live Streaming using Silverlight. It is actually pretty trivial to demo a live stream. To create the live source, all you need is a digital video camera that plugs into either a USB port...(read more)

I like LINQ...

Jit Ghosh — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:56:00 GMT

Especially LINQ To XML. There are many exciting aspects of LINQ in general, and LINQ To XML in particular , but I especially like LINQ To XML as an option to (de)serialize between XML and CLR types.

The established pattern for XML serialization in .Net is usually as follows:

· Use tools like WSDl.exe or XSD.exe (if you are using the XML serializer) or svcutil.exe (if you are using the DataContractSerializer) to codegen a set of CLR types from the metadata(XML schema) defining the XML document structure.

· Write some code to cons up an XMLSerializer/DataContractSerializer and call the suitable API to transfer CLR state defined in an instance of a CLR type (or an object tree) to XML data or vice versa

This is a very effective, easy-to-use pattern and is suitable for a significantly large number of scenarios involving XML serialization, especially in case of web services where the serialization piece for in/outbound messages is a part of the plumbing, and all you do is provide the contract and its compatible type system. As such, I am not discounting the established norm at all, and would prescribe it wherever applicable.

However, where I find LINQ To XML having an upper hand is especially in the degree of control afforded to you during the (de)serialization process. Passing in a tree of objects to the serializers and piping XML on the other end or vice versa seems a little like "black magic" - control is made available to you by direct modification (via attribution or specific interface implementations) of the CLR types themselves at authoring time. But what if you had no control on the CLR types ? What if they were designed independent of how they need to be serialized or cannot be modified due to other design restrictions ? Yeah - you would say "bad design" - but it happens, for many reasons - not all of them bad.

Let's take an example. I have the following XML documents - a fictitious scheme for defining some movie metadata:

Movies.xml

<Cast>

<Member>Toby McGuire</Member>

<Member>Willem Defoe</Member>

</Cast>

</Movie>

<Cast>

<Member>Christian Bale</Member>

<Member>Liam Neeson</Member>

</Cast>

</Movie>

<Cast>

<Member>Hugh Jackman</Member>

<Member>Patrick Stewart</Member>

</Cast>

</Movie>

</Movies>

Actors.xml

</Actor>

</Actor>

</Actor>

</Actor>

</Actor>

</Actor>

</Actors>

I also have the following set of types:

public class Movie

{

public string Name { get; set; }

public string Genre { get; set; }

public string Rating { get; set; }

public IEnumerable<CastMember> Cast { get; set; }

}

public class CastMember

{

public string FirstName { get; set; }

public string LastName { get; set; }

public string Gender { get; set; }

public int Age { get; set; }

}

You immediately see the challenges of serializing the XML into say a collection of Movie instances using traditional means. The <Member> element for each entry in the <Cast> of a <Movie> is simply defined as a concatenated result of the first name and the last name of a cast member, with the actual cast member details defined in a separate , unrelated XML document, where as the Movie type is closely related to the CastMember type, by defining it's Cast field as a collection of CastMember. If you used traditional XML Serialization, there is no straightforward way of associating these two separate XML data sources at once to create the combined CLR representation. But let's look at what this would entail using LINQ To XML.

XElement docMovies = XElement.Load("Movies.xml");

XElement docActors = XElement.Load("Actors.xml");

IEnumerable<Movie> Movies = from movie in docMovies.Elements("Movie")

//projecting over the docMovies collection and creating a Movie for each item

select new Movie

{

Name = (string)movie.Attribute("Name"),

Genre = (string)movie.Attribute("Genre"),

Rating = (string)movie.Attribute("Rating"),

//joining each Member in the Cast with the appropriate Actor in the Actors data source

//on FirstName + LastName

Cast = from member in movie.Element("Cast").Elements("Member")

join actor in docActors.Elements("Actor")

on (string)member equals (string)actor.Attribute("FirstName") + " " + (string)actor.Attribute("LastName")

//projecting to create a new CastMember for each item resulting from the join

select new CastMember

{

FirstName = (string)actor.Attribute("FirstName"),

LastName = (string)actor.Attribute("LastName"),

Age = (int)(actor.Element("Age")),

Gender = (string)actor.Element("Gender")

}

};

Looks simple does it not ? It is. Projecting over the collection of <Movie> elements in the document root and creating a new Movie instance for each is the fairly obvious part. The beauty lies in how LINQ allows us to use a join operation to join the Actors.xml data source on the concatenated first name and last name string , and pull in the matching cast member details as well to create the CLR type based composite.

Let's look at a similar example in reverse. Let's say we have the following CLR types and the following code snippet that populates some instances:

public class Movie

{

public string Name { get; set; }

public string Genre { get; set; }

public string Rating { get; set; }

public IEnumerable<string> CastNames { get; set; }

}

public class CastMember

{

public string FirstName { get; set; }

public string LastName { get; set; }

public string Gender { get; set; }

public int Age { get; set; }

}

List<Movie> movieList = new List<Movie>{

new Movie{ Name="SpiderMan", Rating="PG-13", Genre="Action",

CastNames=new List<string>{"Toby McGuire","Willem Defoe"}

new Movie{ Name="BatMan", Rating="PG-13", Genre="Action",

CastNames=new List<string>{"Christian Bale","Liam Neeson"}

new Movie{ Name="X-Men", Rating="PG-13", Genre="Action",

CastNames=new List<string>{"Hugh Jackman","Patrick Stewart"}

}};

List<CastMember> castList = new List<CastMember>{new CastMember{FirstName="Toby", LastName="McGuire", Gender="Male", Age=30},

new CastMember{FirstName="Willem", LastName="Defoe", Gender="Male", Age=55},

new CastMember{FirstName="Christian", LastName="Bale", Gender="Male", Age=35},

new CastMember{FirstName="Liam", LastName="Neeson", Gender="Male", Age=55},

new CastMember{FirstName="Hugh", LastName="Jackman", Gender="Male", Age=32},

new CastMember{FirstName="Patrick", LastName="Stewart", Gender="Male", Age=60}};

Now let's say we want to serialize the two collections - movieList and castList into the following XML:

<Cast>

</Member>

</Member>

</Cast>

</Movie>

<Cast>

</Member>

</Member>

</Cast>

</Movie>

<Cast>

</Member>

</Member>

</Cast>

</Movie>

</Movies>

The challenge again is pretty obvious - the types Movie and CastMember have no direct physical association, with Movie.CastNames defined as a collection of strings - each string being a concatenation of the first name and last names of actors. Where as, in the serialized XML form, the <Member> element defines a cast member in its full glory - all the fields from the CastMember type are represented - two as attributes and two others as nested elements. Not that it is insurmountable using traditional serialization means, LINQ To XML makes it trivial.

XElement moviesRoot =

new XElement("Movies",from movie in movieList

select new XElement("Movie", new XAttribute("Name", movie.Name),

new XAttribute("Rating", movie.Rating),

new XAttribute("Genre", movie.Genre),

new XElement("Cast",from memberName in movie.CastNames

join castMember in castList on memberName equals castMember.FirstName + " " + castMember.LastName

select new XElement("Member", new XAttribute("FirstName", castMember.FirstName),

new XAttribute("LastName", castMember.LastName),

new XElement("Gender", castMember.Gender),

new XElement("Age", castMember.Age)

)

);

moviesRoot.Save("MoviesOut.xml");

One of the XElement constructors defines the Content parameter as a variable parameter list, and we take full advantage of it. The code above constructs an XElement for the root element <Movies>, and then passes a projection on the movieList collection as the Content, constructing a new XElement for each <Movie> element within. Since Content can be specified as a variable parameter list, the necessary attributes for <Movie> are created, and the same concept is applied to defining the <Cast> element etc. The trick again is in the ability to join the two collections Movie.CastNames and castList on the concatenation of FirstName and LastName, that allows us to create the required composite serialized version from the two otherwise unassociated types.

In summary, I would urge you to take a close look at LINQ To XML - it can be a pretty important tool in your arsenal, especially in those cases where serialization is accompanied with non-trivial transformation needs in either direction.

Trying again...

Jit Ghosh — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:55:00 GMT

My first and only post to this (or for that matter any) blog was about 4 years ago - that probably tells you something about my abilities to provide insightful information on a blog. However, I wanted to give this blogging "thing" another shot. Since most of my teammates are avid bloggers with very well read blogs, I am probably doing this out of sheer inferiority complex, but I will let you decide the quality of my posts for yourself.

I am still an Architect with Microsoft's Developer & Platform Evangelism team - our team focuses on helping our customers build mission critical solutions on our developer platform and provide necessary knowledge transfer and architecture & design assistance to that end.

My industry focus these days is entirely on the Media & Entertainment vertical. In that space I primarily interact with producers and consumers of digital content - over a wide spectrum of businesses like broadcast studios, cable providers, publishers, advertising agencies etc. and to a certain extent some of our solution provider partners. I deal with a variety of solutions formats ranging from content production workflow and related automation to digital rights management to digital content delivery platforms.

Moving forward my posts will mostly fall in one of two categories - the Microsoft developer platform being one and digital media related solutions being another. Here's to trying again...

After a lot of deliberations...

Jit Ghosh — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 01:58:00 GMT

...and having been put to shame by coworkers for not blogging, here I am finally.

Hello World. I am Jit Ghosh - a .NET Architect Evangelist with Microsoft, and this is my first blog entry.

In my day job I try to help customers understand and adopt the Microsoft .NET and Windows Server platform for building enterprise applications, and advise them on the architectural aspects of .NET based application development. In my past life, I have worked for several systems integration firms of varying sizes, designing and implementing enterprise application architectures.

At home, I am a husband and a father of a five year old, and part time electronics enthusiast.

So what might you find on my blog ?

Topics on enterprise architecture, design patterns, and pretty much anything that has to do with computing on the Windows Platform interests me. Check in every now and then for tidbits on all of this stuff, plus some general ranting.

I will try to be as regular as possible.

Until the next entry,

- Jit