Brad Abrams : Mix07

Heading to ReMix Boston

BradA — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:54:10 GMT

I am super excited to be headed to Boston in a couple of weeks for ReMix Boston... I have heard from many folks that wish that could have made it to Vegas, but could not... In addition, I know that folks are hungry to see what is new in the web world now that Silverlight 1.0 is launched.

I am lucky enough to be doing the keynote... Among other things, I am happy to Miguel de Icaza come up on stage with me and demo some of the cool new MoonLight work (Silverlight on Linux).

There are also a bunch of other very cool breakout sessions given by some of the best speakers in the industry..

Check out all the great information and sign up: http://www.remix07boston.com/ Also be sure to check out the discount code that Bob posted.

Cool new ASP.NET 3.5 and Silverlight demo application

BradA — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 08:58:16 GMT

Steve Marx apparently never gets tired of writing video centric web sites... he has done it again and it is very cool. I am impressed with the fact that there is so few lines of code (in fact there is more CSS markup than code).. this is due to the simplicity that Linq, ASP.NET 3.5 and Silverlight brings to the developers.

Here is the the code and a screen cast.

Steve uses a bunch of new stuff!

Searching and paging via ListView, DataPager, and LinqDataSource (all new ASP.NET controls with .NET 3.5).
Video player via the Media control in the ASP.NET Futures July CTP (uses Silverlight 1.0 RC).
Popup biographies and "more/less" collapsible details via the new .NET 3.5-compatible drop of the AJAX Control Toolkit.
Back/forward buttons support via the History control in the ASP.NET Futures July CTP.

Enjoy!

Search engine optimization for Silverlight and Ajax

BradA — Fri, 25 May 2007 07:20:23 GMT

Check out your referral logs.. notice a pattern? If your logs are like mine, a HUGE percentage of your hits are coming through a search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN)... Here is 3 minutes worth of referral logs from my blog...

In a world where a good percentage of your content is dynamically created and displayed in Ajax or Silverlight, how can you enable search engines to find your data?

Well, a bunch of folks across the web have been doing some thinking on this. Jonathan Hawkins recently did a session at mix on the topic and posted some thoughts. Nikhil also discussed the issue in his talk at mix and posted some interesting techniques as well.

ASP.NET Futures CTP has features to enable you to have multiple code driven dynamic sitemaps. This can be used for ASP.NET, AJAX and Silverlight web applications. There is a quickstart tutorial.

Enjoy!

Demo code for Mix07 talk: Silverlight: Creating and Delivering Amazing Video Experiences on the Web

BradA — Fri, 18 May 2007 08:45:00 GMT

FYI -- I just posted the demo code for my Mix07 talk... It uses VS Orcas Beta1, Silverlight 1.0 Beta and the ASP.NET "Futures" .

I'd love to have feedback and comments!

MySilverlightTV.zip [24MB] -- Without example videos

mySilverlightTV(WithVideos) [93MB] - With example videos (Update:I got a fix, should work now!)

Oh, and here is the video, slides, writeup, on line demo and demo steps.

Thanks again to Steve Marx for LOTS of support on the development and Corrina for the excellent design work.

Enjoy!

ASP.NET "Futures" Release

BradA — Thu, 17 May 2007 01:00:00 GMT

I am super excited about the ASP.NET Futures release we did recently. I think it shows off some cool new thinking in the ASP.NET space, for Ajax applications and of course Silverlight support.

I demoed much of this stuff as part of my Mix talk, but I wanted to highlight a few here for

ASP.NET AJAX

New functionality includes CSS selector APIs, navigation history support (Back button support), a utility for extracting resources from assemblies, and more. Check out my mix talk for some cool stuff on back button support.

Silverlight Controls for ASP.NET

Enables the ability to include media (video, audio) vector graphics, and animations by using familiar and powerful ASP.NET server controls. This is very cool because it enable server side databinding for video, audio, etc.

Again, Check out my mix talk and Nikhil's talk

Dynamic Data Controls for ASP.NET

Introduces a set of data controls that provide a simple, intuitive user interface for data-driven Web pages. Check out Maheshp and Polita's talk from some cool demos.

ASP.NET Application Services

Offers new application services to make AJAX and Silverlight Web applications more discoverable from search engines and easily searchable from within the site. Additional services help you gather and analyze data about client errors.

Check out Stefan and Johnathan's talk

Dynamic Languages support in ASP.NET

Begins support for two languages that are hosted on the DLR, IronPython and Managed Jscript.. Check out Just Glue it...

oh, and be sure the check out the reference pages we have for this release. I think it is very complete for such an early release.

I would really value your feedback... we are looking forward to hearing from you about what works and doesn't work in your applications so we can decide what to focus on for a future release.

Thanks!

Silverlight on the Ireland PodLeaders podcast

BradA — Thu, 10 May 2007 05:57:05 GMT

It was my great fortune to meet Tom Raftery at Mix.. I am very excited to be a guest on his PodLeaders podcast. He is taking questions now... Send in a few easy ones as well as hard questions ;-)

thanks!

PM Tip #12: Don't waist keystrokes

BradA — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:54:00 GMT

At Mix I ran into Jeff Atwood who reminded me about a my post on the "Be More Visible" Sham. He also told me I should take a look at Jon Udell's post Too busy to blog? Count your keystrokes [via Jeff's blog]

While I don't think every PM has to be a noteworthy blogger to have a successful career, I do think Jon's principle of conservation of keystrokes is an important one. By far the biggest problem I see on teams of > 1 is communication. Different people know different information, this leads to disconnects and often to product design, quality and schedule issues.

Teams need better communication and PMs are primarily responsible for this. So think about the email you are getting ready to write... Should you add a tester or dev to that email? better yet, should you use a team alias? What info should flow up to your management chain or across to your peers? can you forward that mail? And to Jon's point, can you just blog it and share it with the world?

As Jon mentions, there is a time and a place for private communications, but generally we tend to overuse them.

Good luck and happy communicating!

Mix Session Video -- Silverlight: Creating and Delivering Amazing Video Experiences on the Web

BradA — Sun, 06 May 2007 01:06:34 GMT

I just noticed that they got the video for my Mix talk posted...

Silverlight: Creating and Delivering Amazing Video Experiences on the Web

It is completely free! You don't have to have been an attendee to see it.

Please take a look and let me hear your thoughts and feedback.

Enjoy!

Silverlight @ Mix: The Home Games

BradA — Wed, 02 May 2007 10:16:00 GMT

I know many of you are following all the excitement here at Mix from home. I am super happy that they already have several of the sessions posted for live streaming or downloading. Here are a few that I think are worth watching first..

Mike Harsh: Deep Dive on Silverlight Media Integration

Mike goes super deep on the media support in Silverlight...

John Lam and Jim Hugunin: Just Glue It! Ruby and the DLR in Silverlight

John and Jim are an excellent duo... They have a great interchange on the power of dynamic languages ion the platform.

Anders Hejisberg: Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications

Anders + Linq. What more do I need to say.

Jamie Cool and Nick Kramer:Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET (Part 1 of 2) and Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET (Part 2 of 2)

Jamie and Nick cover Silverlight 1.1 (the managed code stuff) in great detail.

Omar Khan: Using Visual Studio Codename "Orcas" to Design and Develop Rich AJAX Enabled Web Sites

Omar does a great job giving you an overview of the cool new stuff in orcas.

They are posting more all the time at: http://sessions.visitmix.com/ Stay toned...

Silverlight 1.1 "Airlines" managed code sample published

BradA — Wed, 02 May 2007 03:50:23 GMT

Wow -- less than a day after they keynote we have the source code for the "Silverlight airlines" application posted.

Check out David Anson blog on it which includes a live link and of course full source code!

Check it out and build your own!

I can't wait to see what folks do with this stuff... please send me your sample apps!

Mix Session Overview -- Silverlight: Creating and Delivering Amazing Video Experiences on the Web

BradA — Tue, 01 May 2007 19:43:00 GMT

I had a great time in my Mix session today... there was great buzz in the room.

Silverlight download
ASP.NET Futures download
Live demo site [Demo Steps]
Update: Video of the the talk

Here are a few highlights...

I started off talking about the importance of having your site "Look Great and Feel Great".
In the demo for this section, I showed off I Expression Media Encoder.

What is really cool is that Expression also outputs the brand new asp:Media control. This is so cool because it handles all the issues of using Silverlight in the different browsers with NO client side javascript and fully use the power of the server (databinding, etc). Check out the new ASP.NET Futures release to get these bits.

The next principle I talked about was "Uninterrupted Flow". The goal here is to make sure there are not obtrusive breaks in the flow of your application. I often see this when a page does a full refresh as the user browses around. It is much cleaner to only refersh the parts of the page that you need to.

Luckily this is very easy to do with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel.

To use UpdatePanel, you simple wrap part of your page in an UpdatePanel ContentTemplate. This turns any post-backs into xmlhttp calls that results in refreshing only that part of the page.

The next principle I covered was "Immediate Response to user action". The goal here is to make sure that users are notified immediately when an operation may take sometime. With the vagaries of network connections and server load it is important to give users and indication that stuff is happening..

This is easy to accomplish with the ASP.NET AJAX UpdateProgress.

This control attaches itself to an UpdatePanel and displays the ProgressTemplete whenever a call goes out over XmlHttp and then brings in back down when the call comes back. I am using a cool animated gif to indicate progress is happening. All of this with NO code client side or server side...

The next principle I talked about was to "Suggest options". Image the amount data you have at your disposal. Your product catalog, your user's past choices, aggregate user preferences, hit logs and etc, etc. What can you do with that data to create a more sticky experience for users so that want to come back to your site again and again.

One way to do that is with the AJAX control toolkit's AutoCompleteExtender

Here we take the text from the search text box and passes it to a web service where a completion list is generated, returned to the client and displayed in a drop down. All that via JSON over XmlHttp so it is very fast and standards based.

"Preserve user preferences" The user has invested time and energy into your site.. What state can you preserve so that it doesn’t have to be repeated?

I showed two ways to preserve user preferences... The first is the new asp:History support.

What we do here is provide an easy, programmatic way for the developer to explicitly manage the backbutton state in the way that makes sense in the application. We do this via a set of hidden IFrames.

The second way we manage state is to preserve the current state of the play list and the location within the currently playing video in the ASP.NET profile store. ASP.NET AJAX gives us strongly typed client side access to the profile store that we set whenever new items are added to the playlist and we load from when the page starts up.

The next principle is about "Enable Sharing". The web is a fundamentally collaborative place. The first thing I want to do when I see a cool video is want to share it with folks. Nearly every element of our sites should enable sharing.

You can get a permalink from the asp:History control or set it programaticly... Here is an example of how that looks in the mySilverlightTV site...

And of course the resulting link works for my buddies on the mac just fine...

Next I talked about how to "Be Found". In rich client side applications a lot of your content is often locked away in a database that the search engines can't access... and if the search engines can't access them, your users can't find you. So how do you expose your database to the search engines? Luckily the search engines have agreed on a Xml format called a sitemap that provides a set of links to traverse to index all the content on your site.

It is simple to create a sitemap with the new ASP.NET search sitemap feature.

In web.config you setup a class that will return an IEnumerable of the data to push in to the sitemap. In the class, I am using Linq to pull out all the items from my database and returning those that should be indexed. Finally a search sitemap is created dynamically the moment the search engine goes to index your site.

The last principle is about letting Ads "Be Seen". This is about using relevant, no-intrusive ads that provide meaningful impressions.

To implement this we use the power of Silverlight to dynamically shrink the video while it is playing and displaying a targeted, relevant ad in the background. The ad is fetched in the background via a web services call. On the server you can use profile information to choose the best add to show.

We also talked about a very cool plug in to LiveWriter to do user generated content

Silverlight Live Publishing plugin for Windows Live Writer

Special things to all the folks that helped out here including..
Steve Marx
Corrina (our designers)
James Clarke
Chris Knowlton

Silverlight on .NET Rocks

BradA — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:35:55 GMT

I had a chance to talk to the great folks over at .NET Rocks about a couple of the big Silverlight announcements we did here at the show.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

Show #233: Brad Abrams Announces Silverlight

The whole think is great, but the interview with me starts at about 12:20

Mix Sandbox in the Sky and my demo...

BradA — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 22:08:38 GMT

Have you checked out the Mix Sandbox in the Sky yet? It is a free web hoster that has all the cool bits we are talking about here already installed.

If you are here at Mix, it allows you to build, install and share YOUR work. If you are following the action from home, you can see what folks are building.

Steve Marx just got the demo for my talk posted on the sandbox... Go check it out! But please come to the talk to see how it is built ;-) (today at 4:30p)

Notice it is just a demo, so not everything fully works... You will need the beta of Silverlight 1.0 that we just released (silverlight.net)

Enjoy!

O'Reilly Short Cut: Getting Started with Silverlight

BradA — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:26:32 GMT

I just ran into one of the editors from O'Reilly in the halls at Mix and he told me that they just published a "Short Cut" on Silverlight.

I have not read it yet, but Shawn Wildermuth is very plugged in guy and a proven author so I am sure it is great.

Getting Started with Silverlight
By Shawn Wildermuth
April 2007
Pages: 62

Let me know what you think...

On my way to Mix....

BradA — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 05:50:31 GMT

I can't wait for Mix to start... Friday we locked down all the bits we are giving out (and it is a LOT of them)... polished some very cool demos and got our hands on the final version of some other cool stuff. You could really feel the buzz growing over in building 42 and building 10!

I am very excited about the talk I am giving... It will be a lot of fun and will cover a some great Silverlight media stuff, some new ASP.NET AJAX work and of course Expression and Visual Studio.

If you are there, please come... If not, look for the demo and slides after the event.

Silverlight: Creating and Delivering Amazing Video Experiences on the Web
Monday, April 30 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM, Lando 4301A
Speakers: Brad Abrams, Chris Knowlton - Microsoft
Audiences: Developer, Designers
Customer demands for richer UX, multi-platform support, and higher quality video are continually factors in cost of delivery. Learn how you can easily create your own video centric web site with rich search, organization, ratings and user uploaded content. This session will cover technologies including Silverlight, Expression Studio, ASP.NET and new features for Windows "Longhorn" Server that separately or together will improve the end user experience, reduce the cost of video and rich media delivery, and provide monetization opportunities for companies of all sizes. This session is intended for anyone involved in the creation, management, and experience of digital media on the Web.

If that is not enough -- here is a screen shoot of the amazing work Corrina (our designer) did for this demo... As I mentioned earlier, Steve Marx did a HUGE amount of work on it... The demo (and the product) are MUCH better for his efforts...