Synergist

Two weeks ago, I went down to Hollywood to meet with a very exciting team who is creating a TV experience on the web using Silverlight. Musician/Actor Ice Cube and his team talk about the web site in a short video that I recorded at Ice Cube's CubeVision...

One of my customers asked me how to make a volume control for his custom media play in Silverlight 1.0. First I looked to the video gallery on Silverlight.net but I didn't find a sample so I created a simple demo in about 30 minutes that shows how to...

As you can see, I have been experimenting with posting video on my blog now that I have a HD Video Camera ( JVC GZ-HD7U ). I have been trying various encoding formats in Expression Encoder to get a good balance of bit-rate and quality. Here is my workflow...

Mike Downey, Group Manager of Platform Evangelism at Adobe Systems, wrote a comment to my blog post about Ice Cube's UVNTV.com about the Silverlight install experience that he experienced on his Mac: Also, in order to view the video I had to leave your...

I just added an animated "Press Play" graphic to the Silverlight Media Player created with Expression Encoder. I created the graphic (with animation) as a separate XAML file so it can be easily reused. To see it in action, see this blog post . Feel free...

So Google made a big announcement last week about OpenSocial . I saw that as something very interesting because, as I read about it, it became more and more clear that it was really something big. I have always been a proponent of open standards in software...

Last month, I wrote this blog post on how I was using the Webdings typeface to create graphics for Silverlight applications. Well, on Friday I got my MacBook and instantly saw that with Silverlight installed, Webding characters were not showing up in...

I was just able to figure out how to use the Windows Live Space Photo Control and get it to serve up images to Silverlight. Here's what the Windows Live Spaces Photo control can do: The Windows Live Spaces control is a client-side browser JavaScript object...

What encoding settings should I use for Expression Encoder for HD Video? How should I encode differently for progressive or streaming? How do I reduce buffering in my video? When anyone at Microsoft has a question about media encoding formats...

Over the weekend, my challenge was to learn about OpenSocial and create a Silverlight application that uses it. I did that, with this simple application . To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google...

My knee has been troubling me for the past few months because of a torn Meniscus . This afternoon I had a minor surgery called at Partial Menisectomy . I am now back home in bed with my leg elevated ready for a relaxing weekend. It went well.

After getting two similar questions from colleagues today about my first OpenSocial application , it struck me that the perceptions and reality of OpenSocial are a bit confused. My colleague Dare Obasanjo describes it succinctly in five sentences (with...

I just posted the recording of the webinar that I did today showing a Word 2007 Add-in that creates WPF Flow Documents (using the FlowDocument class): https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/view?id=74SMQS Here's an example of where I've used it to...

I'm having a blast with Popfly, Microsoft's Silverlight-based mash-up designers. I've created a block that uses AOL Video Search and made a simple page that shows the results of what it does. I fell as if I'm just scratching the surface of something really...

What is Spock ? It's a search engine for people you know on the Internet. If you search for me, you'll find this page . If you search for "Spock" on Spock, you'll find this page . The cool thing is that Spock has a REST-based web service API . Because...

March 2008 will be a very busy month for me. First I will be going to Mix in Las Vegas, March 5-7, then I will be catching a plane to Austin to go to my first South by Southwest for the interactive, film, and music festivals. Mix is Microsoft's conference...

My colleague Joe Hofstader just got an article published on MSDN. Here's a summary: Being an architect on a CaaS solution over the last few years has brought some interesting perspective into the unique challenges of the development and deployment of...

I have been showing off Popfly as a great example of a Silverlight 1.0 application but my colleague David Chou has gone even deeper with this post about Popfly as a Platform : Popfly provides an environment where people without a significant technical...