Nigel Parker's Outside Line : silverlight

PDC Day 2 – Silverlight 4

nparker — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:14:30 GMT

If Windows Azure was the big topic on day 1 of the PDC conference in LA. For me Silverlight 4 was certainly the big topic of day 2.

Scott Guthrie introduced Silverlight 4 during the keynote and showed some of the enhancements that are being introduced to the new version of the platform.

Tim Heuer has done a great job blogging Silverlight 4 Beta – A complete guide to the new features this blog post includes all the tools you need to download to build on Silverlight 4 so I recommend you start there.

In addition to this a number of other resources have been made available as well during PDC:

Channel 9 Launched a Silverlight 4 Training Course

The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes hands-on-labs, a video and a whitepaper designed to help you learn about the new features in Silverlight 4 focusing on three major areas: Enabling Business Application Development, Empowering Richer Experiences and Moving Beyond the Browser.

Also Channel 9 has published a video Rundown of Silverlight 4 Beta

Key Tweets from @follesoe:

I think today will go down in history as the date Silverlight goes mainstream for majority of .NET devs holding off. #pdc09 - 10:03 AM Nov 18th

Share assemblies without separate compile step between SL4 and .NET 4. Great for Silverlight 4 #TDD and #MVVM. #pdc09 - 9:48 AM Nov 18th

Another key area of interest for me is the enhancements in IIS Media streaming technology. During the keynote Scott (attempted) to preview a sneak peak of publishing smooth streaming video content from IIS to an iphone leveraging the HTML 5 <video/> tag.

If you have an iphone you can try for yourself by visiting http://iis.net/iphone there is more detail about the advancements in the IIS media services in Vishal Sood’s PDC session Building Live Media Viewing Experiences Using Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming and the Smooth Streaming Player SDK.

Also Karen Corby did a great job presenting an Overview of Silverlight 4 session at PDC (video).

There are lots of Silverlight related session available for download now. Some highlights include:

CL06
Networking and Web Services in Silverlight
Yavor Georgiev
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL07
Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services
Dinesh Kulkarni
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL35
Custom Behaviors for Advanced Microsoft Silverlight UI Effects
Peter Blois
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL19
NEW: Building Line of Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 4
David Poll
WMV
WMVHigh

CL20
NEW: Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Microsoft Silverlight 4
Joe Stegman
WMV
WMVHigh

CL21
Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services
Brad Abrams
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL24
XAML Futures in Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Silverlight and Tools
Michael Shim, Rob Relyea
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL01
NEW TITLE: Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview
Karen Corby
WMV
WMVHigh
MP4
Slides

CL30
Microsoft Expression Blend 3 for Developers: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices
DoRon Motter
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL34
Media Foundation: Supporting Hardware Codecs and Cameras
Stan Pennington
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

CL36
Deep Dive on Bing Maps Silverlight Control
Keith Kinnan
WMV
WMVHigh
Slides

Lots of content to consume and now that Silverlight is installed on around 45% of internet using computers around the world it is a great time to start considering using it for your next project.

Air New Zealand Fashion Week Finale!

nparker — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:27:00 GMT

I convinced Michael Ng (the official photographer) for Air New Zealand Fashion week to attempt a photosynth at last nights Stolen Girlfriends show. I think he did a great job! Showing the models and the who’s who celebs in the front row.

Add this with some super high resolution beauty shots

in the MSN “wall of fashion” and the kooky Pamela Anderson (warning semi nudity on the link) below

With that we round out Air New Zealand Fashion Week with a photo wall that contains 593 photos, 156,680 files, 2.68GB.

I previously released the source code and talked about how I built the viewer.

Building the MSN Silverlight "Wall of Fashion" for Air New Zealand Fashion Week

nparker — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:37:00 GMT

Anyone that has been reading my blog for a while will know that I have been working with DeepZoom for some time now.

I have been very keen to get Silverlight onto MSN.co.nz for a while. An opportunity presented itself for me to build a DeepZoom viewer and purchase 700 photos from Michael Ng (the official event photographer for Air New Zealand Fashion Week). MSN came to the party by featuring the “Wall of Fashion” and promoting it from their homepage and Fashion Week mini site.

The challenge that I faced was two-fold.

1) I needed to bypass the MSN CMS system due to the share number of files required to publish a large DeepZoom.

2) I needed a system that could handle large demand and be updated in a timely fashion throughout the week.

What I came up with is not completely automated like DeepZoomPix but does leverage a number of open source projects and stores the tiles on Windows Azure.

Given that Windows Azure is becoming commercially available at PDC (17-19 Nov) in 21 countries including New Zealand I thought I’d run the stats to see what a project like this would actually cost (the service is free until launch).

We are half way through the event and I have already published 380 photos, 98,922 files (1.67 GB) into the Windows Azure Blog Storage.

Take the stats from the first day before the official launch 582 people spent on average 1:09 mins on the gallery. This served ~34MB per person or about 19GB of content downloaded.

On current preliminary Windows Azure pricing this first day of activity would have cost.

Storage – 1.67 GB @ $0.15USD / GB / month - 0.25 USD

Bandwidth in - 1.67 GB @ $0.10USD / GB - 0.167 USD

Bandwidth out – ~19GB @ $0.15USD / GB - 2.85 USD

Storage Transactions – ~1,455,000 @ $0.01 / 10K – 1.46 USD

Total ~ 4.73 USD or <1c per user.

What I Built:

First of all I looked at the eventr project on Codeplex, built by Jordan from Readify who was over for Tech.Ed NZ last week to deliver some killer Silverlight sessions.

Eventr is a Silverlight deep zoom reference application. The interesting bits are implemented in the SuperDeepZoom control, which may be either dropped straight in to your project (turnkey) or you can open it up and see what makes it tick.

I did end up using the DeepZoom Collection Creator from eventr to slice new images as they arrive on our FTP server but I didn’t leverage the rest of the code base.

Although it was excellently written an leverages an MVC pattern, eventr just wasn’t suitable for static blob hosting on Windows Azure. To host eventr on Windows Azure both Services and Compute would be required thus increasing the overall cost of hosting the solution.

Secondly I looked at the SpaceBlock project on Codeplex this is what Michael used for the Sydney Mardi Gras project.

Also check out this great post on Hosting Silverlight Applications in Azure Blob Storage.

In the end I actually chose to extend a project that I had created previously in Nov 2008 that was based on Wilfred Pinto’s previous work.

The source code is wrapped up and available (minus the images) at http://kiwi.blob.core.windows.net/code/FashionWeek.zip

Also I can’t forget the legal bit (This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. )

I have added a rudimentary Silverlight Tag Cloud for the filter on the right based on Mark Monster’s work. Again there is a much better Silverlight Tag Cloud project on codeplex but it uses WCF services and therefore couldn’t live in Azure Blob Storage alone.

I first presented the player during the Tech.Ed NZ Keynote last week on stage with Chris Liddell.

And published it on the Tech.Ed NZ website to take it for a test run before fashion week.

During this test I realised that it is not easy to publish additional images after the fact if they are not named in descending order.

To achieve this I wrote a c# app some time ago that renames photos based on timedate info in the EXIF tags. You can grab this from http://kiwi.blob.core.windows.net/code/PhotoSorta.zip

Also I can’t forget the legal bit (This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. )

Running this before slicing the images meant that ordering in the metadata remained chronological

I have also been asked why there is a slight leather texture behind the images. This is an agreement I made with the photographer. The photos that we are posting from Air New Zealand Fashion Week are highest quality available. The way DeepZoom works is that each image is sliced into thousands of small jpgs at a range of different zoom levels and is reconstructed on the fly making it impossible for people to access high resolution images from their browser cache. That it this doesn’t stop people zooming and taking screen captures to copy images. This is where the subtle texture comes in so that we (and the photographer) can tell if an image is posted elsewhere that has been taken from our site.

All in all to round things off I wanted to add some enhancements to the player.

The first is a feature of Silverlight 3 that enables the user to launch the player “Out of Browser” either right click and install or click the select designer tab and the download icon in the bottom left.

This then enables you to launch the viewer from the start menu on your PC or Mac.

Also in the same location I have added the option for IE8 users to add the viewer as a Web Slice, this way as new photos are added each day users can be notified and access the slide show directly from their favourites bar without leaving their current web page. Giorgio has a detailed post on building a webslice for the Imagine Cup. Incidentally 4.5% of the traffic (16% of IE users) to the site is now coming via the WebSlice and the average time spent in the viewer is 3:22 mins (almost triple that on the viewers that hit the site directly!).

I had fun putting this all together and I hope by sharing the code and the opportunity with Windows Azure you may consider doing something similar for the next large event you are asked to cover.

FYI there are a number approaches to get analytics working for tracking Silverlight applications

I didn’t get time to implement this fully but it does give you some data as long as your users aren't using IE8 InPrivate Filtering to block the prying Googley eyes :)

Silverlight 3 + Expression 3 Launch

nparker — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:49:00 GMT

I previously blogged about the release of Silverlight 3. Today I want to expand on this and talk about the Release To Manufacturing of Expression Studio 3 and DeepZoom Composer.

Having used these products and technologies for a little while now I racked my brain to figure out the best way to communicate the capabilities of each of these technologies to you.

All too often with the nature of blogging, tweeting and instant feedback the best projects/ ideas and implementations get referenced but lost as quickly as they are found. IMO it is important to step back, take a breath and look at what is still impressing you days or weeks later. By grouping these things together into a single cohesive piece of work you can then tell a story that marks a moment in time and is compelling to a broader group of people.

So that is what I did… I chose to use the latest version of the tools and platforms to showcase what I think is the most awesome work that is being done here in New Zealand and around the world. I apologise now if I missed your project out but feel free to drop a link in the comments so others can experience it.

The experience that I built leverages IIS Smooth Streaming and I have removed all the standard video player UI that I hope is not required to watch this showcase (buffer UI, scrub bar, timer, volume control etc). That said the video chunks are coming from a US media server (unfortunately) so I have found that they do tend to play out below their maximum quality to most people in New Zealand. For this reason I have added a download option for those wanting to download and experience the video in full HD.

If you like what you see remember to click the Twitter icon and feed the social media juggernaut!

Silverlight 3 Released

nparker — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:16:00 GMT

Silverlight 3 was released to the web today along with it a new release candidate build of Expression Blend 3 that includes SketchFlow.

Check out the new C9 Video – with Scott Guthrie & Christian Schormann

Also there are new landing pages for

There are a couple of great Silverlight 3 Out of Browser Examples:

thirsteen23 – Silverlight 3 TED Video Player
sobees – social desktop aggregator (right click to go out of browser)

Also I recommend that you check out What’s new in Expression Encoder 3 in the way of OOB support.

In Encoder 3, if you choose to enable offline support when you publish a Silverlight video, the user will have the option of downloading and installing not only the media player code but also the video and audio files.
This feature also works in conjunction with IIS Smooth Streaming so you get the benefit of adaptive streaming when online and a downloaded, high quality version to watch when away from a network.

Check out the Top Silverlight Features especially the new extensible media format support with RAW AV rocks!

Tim Heuer has a great post on what is new and what has changed.

To install all the new bits take a trip over to http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

For Deep Zoom there is a new version of Deep Zoom Composer which brings back source code and an updated version of RiaServices at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices - Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 2: Rich Data Query

Christian has posted SketchFlow Concepts: An Overview and there is are new Blend 3 and Web 3 overview videos available.

Check out http://seethelight.com which is the official launch site that has recently gone live.

Stay tuned to the Silverlight and Expression Studio Virtual Press Room and Twitter for more updates!

GOVIS09 Videos Making Windows Media Streaming work Cross Platform.

nparker — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:42:00 GMT

It is funny the things that can start on Twitter these days. Take this Twitter conversation between Don Christie (President of NZOSS) and Kevin Ackhurst (Microsoft NZ MD).

I guess this is my opportunity to explain the situation and offer a solution.

GOVIS09 videos have been published exclusively using Microsoft Media Server (Microsoft's proprietary network streaming protocol used to transfer unicast data in Windows Media Services). In itself Windows Media Streams have some advantages in that the video isn’t downloaded or cached on the local machine; it is scalable and supports live events and you can instantly move to the end of the video without waiting to download all the in between bits (unlike video solutions like YouTube).

Incidentally we have released Microsoft Media Server Protocol Specification document and there is a free, open source implementation of the MMS protocol.

There are multiple ways to consume and play Windows Media Streams that I will get onto in a moment but the root of the problem identified above is that the ISV that delivered the GOVIS solution is delivering a Windows Media Player only solution that doesn’t work on Mac or Linux.

To answer Colin Jackson’s question, “I though Microsoft ~~was~~ is an interoperability company now?”

I thought I’d take on the challenge to present the existing published GOVIS video streams inside a solution that plays cross browser and cross platform using Free and Open Source Software.

1) I chose to present the videos using SilverStripe (2008 New Zealand Open Source Software Project of the year) running on Windows Server 2008 R2. (Single click install using the Web PI).

2) I download the FOSS JW WMV Player from Google Code

3) I linked it all up at http://compati.bility.co.nz

The next challenge was to test that this plays out fine on a Linux desktop.

I followed Grant’s excellent post on getting openSUSE to run under virtual PC. Since I’m running Windows 7 I was able to take advantage of the awesome new Virtual PC beta that takes advantage of the Intel™ Virtualization or AMD-V Technologies.

Once SUSE was up and running I popped over to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

Moonlight is a free, open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems (You can download a tarball of the source here).

I popped back to http://compati.bility.co.nz and accepted the license for the Windows Media Codec's and Voilà I was watching the Windows Media Services GOVIS09 videos in Linux.

The next task was to create pages for each of the videos listed on the GOVIS site. I must admit that I was surprised to find that a quarter of the videos would not play!

At a quick glance there appears to be a low level encoding error on the following fifteen videos (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15) which includes ironically Don Christie’s presentation. I'm keen to look deeper into this issue to understand more about what is going on with those affected videos.

I have linked to the other 42 working videos for your enjoyment from the home page at http://compati.bility.co.nz

Enjoy!

Expression For Art’s Sake – 3 1/2 Day Silverlight 3 Camp – Wellington, NZ

nparker — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:29:00 GMT

There’s no better way to try a new technology than getting people together to learn, share and build on top of it. So, that’s what we’ve been doing with Silverlight and Expression Studio for the last couple of years: Inviting a board array of developers and designers (you) to come spend time with us.

The Aussies held their event last December, so now it was New Zealand’s turn!

Tim has already written about Expression For Art’s Sake that took place in Wellington from the 20th to 23rd of April last month and now it is my turn to provide some more detail.

At the highest level I organised this event to get developers and designers of all different experience levels working together to get hands on with Blend 3 and Silverlight 3.

For those of you with short attention spans I have created a “super fast” overview video highlighting the 30 hours of workshop in just seven minutes!

For every one else here is a one hour summary video of the first two and a half days (download).

The Group Dynamics

3 Master Trainers

Tim Heuer, Arturo Toledo, Zef

The Teams (17 companies, 33 people)

Click Suite – Cam, Pieter
Datacom – Ben, David, Ronald
Datacraft – Dom, Mark
Gen-i – Craig, Tim
ICE Interactive –Nigel, Melissa
Intergen – Raymond, Andrew
Marker Studio – Darren, Keith
NV Interactive – Brent, Nadia
Phosphor Essence – Aaron, Toby
Provoke – Callum, Isha
Pure Direction – Grant, Darko, Dave
Signify/MSO Design – Charles, Stacey
TePapa – Tim
Y&R/ Microsoft – Vikki, Aditia, Samuel, Kris
Xero - Jeff, Kirk

Challenge #1 – Build a “Hello World” in Silverlight and deploy it to a production web server.

This was a fun activity as introduced an element of “chaos” in securing the domain name for each team. I wanted to introduce teams to the WebPI and present a task that they may not carry out in their own organisations.

The servers that were “claimed”:

Click Suite – http://leacha.bility.co.nz
Datacom – http://ina.bility.co.nz
Datacraft – http://no.bility.co.nz
Gen-i – http://separa.bility.co.nz
ICE Interactive – http://dura.bility.co.nz
Intergen – http://opposa.bility.co.nz
Marker Studio – http://a.bility.co.nz
NV Interactive – http://surviva.bility.co.nz
Phosphor Essence – http://mova.bility.co.nz
Provoke – http://naviga.bility.co.nz
Pure Direction – http://capa.bility.co.nz
Signify/MSO Design – http://lika.bility.co.nz
TePapa – http://staina.bility.co.nz
Y&R/ Microsoft – http://via.bility.co.nz
Xero - http://lia.bility.co.nz

Getting To Know Each Other – WEREWOLF!

What is a few lynched villagers amongst friends?

Challenge #2 – Developing a Mobile Phone for a Kiwi

The challenge here was to start to think about the design process and work together under pressure to present a brief.

Here is a sample of the designs that the teams came up with:

Challenge #3 – Develop a Calculator with a User Control

What were the “New Features” of Silverlight 3 that the teams used most in the Projects?

Designers:

Developers

From here we moved onto projects that would lead to teams Final Presentations.

Some of the teams put their solutions online for you to try.

Silverlight 2 Projects available to try online:

Click Suite – http://leacha.bility.co.nz

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed you can try the Silverlight 3 projects online as well.

Gen-i – http://separa.bility.co.nz
ICE Interactive – http://dura.bility.co.nz/#Recipes
Intergen – http://opposa.bility.co.nz
Marker Studio – http://a.bility.co.nz
Pure Direction – http://capa.bility.co.nz (Login test/ password)
TePapa – http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/
Y&R/ Microsoft – http://via.bility.co.nz/Bliss/
Xero - http://lia.bility.co.nz/MapTest1TestPage.aspx

Also available is the y&soft blingulator.

Final Presentations:

I have made a video that highlights the final presentations (download). All in all the teams did an awesome job going from zero to hero and surviving this very intense, compact training environment.

I have also combined both videos using Smooth Streaming as well.

Online Feedback from the attendees:

Tim wrote:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

Darko wrote:

All in all I think it was a very successful week. Everyone learned a lot and the mentoring from Tim and Arturo helped heaps. If I could improve anything, it would be to make it a day longer just so that there is a proper wind down. I’m really looking forward to working with Silverlight more.

GREAT WORK everybody!

NZsynth – How It Was Done

nparker — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:10:26 GMT

Previously I wrote and demoed the NZsynth application that was built for the WEB09 keynote. This post is detailing how it was made and introducing version two (Zoom all the way in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image).

WATCH THE VIDEO that goes end-to-end on the development of the application (mainly building the mosaic and the extension that Tim Tate created to make the tiles clickable).

The video is also downloadable from Channel9

The Code

It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demo ware and should be treated as such.

Flickr Image Download Code

Mosaic WCF REST Service (Including Flickr Database File)

NZsynth

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/ Hot keys in previous post

Tim’s Silverlight 3 Code and Demo

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/ to look at a running version of Tim’s solution.

NZsynth V2 Source (excluding image tiles)

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/nzsynth (Zoom right in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image)

Key tools

WEBPI to install Visual Studio Silverlight Development Tools & SQL Server 2008 Express
AndreaMosaic
HD Make
Deep Zoom Composer
WCF REST Starter Kit
FlickrNet

Other Resources/ Examples

Jellyfish Deep Zoom
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL
My post DeepZoom-Tastic
http://tr.im/photosEFAS (DeepZoom Pix Photos from Expression for Art’s Sake)
Miss March and Other Distractions (Parental Advisory)
Deep Zoom++ : Build Dynamic Deep Zoom Applications with Open Source

All this got me thinking how this idea could be extended further?

National Geographic have been doing some interesting work with photosynth recently. Check out the Sphinx below.

This is why I was intrigued to see they too have developed a mosaic experience called Infinite Photograph. It is not as smooth or free flowing as the nzsynth mosaic demo but it has a great touch that it repeats on itself after a few layers giving you a “feeling” that you can zoom forever. Also double-clicking images brings up more details like in Tim and my examples.

I guess beyond this we then need to think about video and using dynamic frames in a form of “massive” stop motion animation. If you haven’t seen it yet the YouTube Mosaic Music Video may give you some insight into where my mind is heading.

NZsynth and WEB09

nparker — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:56:00 GMT

It started as a conversation I was having with Brett Roberts regarding options for promoting NZ online at a time when tourism was taking a hit from the current economic climate. From there we discussed the proposed National Cycleway and this lead to a conversation about “crowd sourcing” images that people have already tagged as New Zealand to construct a demo from our shipping Silverlight 2 technology.

This conversation tied in well with a looming keynote slot at WEB09 where I had a 5-10 minute demo slot. The biggest problem was that I only had three days to build the “demo-ware” prototype and present it to a room full of web influential's!

Needless to say after a nervous period fighting with the failing conference WiFi. I switched to the hotel wireless and pulled it off!

Watch a 6 1/2 minute video of the demo I showed at the conference (this time the video is hosted on a US based server so the experience won’t be as good for Kiwis as the demo further down this post).

I have also posted this video on Vimeo (download available).

The demo app is hosted on a development server at Swizzle in their Telstra Albany datacenter. The fact that server was only 1 hop away from the conference venue meant that I could stream video via wireless at 2.4 MBS over the hotel wifi using smooth streaming with NO CACHE! I would go as far as saying that this was the Best Quality Internet Video that people in the room had ever seen stream over the Internet and all this in an environment when no other presenter could get their “US” based video to play without buffering! Goes to show the importance of peering for local content!

As mentioned at the event the “Excellent" video was generously provided by Making Movies for use as stock footage in the demo.

If you are in New Zealand and have a direct connection to the Auckland Peering Exchange I recommend that you try the demo steps for yourself by navigating to http://possi.bility.co.nz.

WEB09 Demo V1

1) Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the Mosaic and the slider to switch between Mosaics with more or less tiles.

Needless to say there was some smoke and mirrors in play during the demo…

Key combinations to try

SPACE bring up photo, mouse click on the image to hide again.
Q to show my photo collection (click on faded background then W to hide)
A to show a photosynth of museum S to hide
Z to show a photosynth of statue (P inside the photosynth to hide photos and show 3d model) S to hide
X to show a photosynth of blackout protest
V to show smooth stream video B to hide (needs to be done last)

In retrospect I didn’t like the way that the watermarked text that I applied to each individual photo tile looked after it was added to the mosaic. Also the tiles were being cut when they were being laid out in the Mosaic so in some cases (like below) the watermark attribution was being partly obscured or not visible at all!

For stage two I wanted to figure out a way to get rid of the watermark all together and work out a way to make individual photos in the Mosaic clickable.

I hadn’t been able to solve this problem in my demo so I used SPACE to bring up a single photo to show my thinking but not having it working.

Tim Tait came up to me after the keynote and we started discussing how I had built the demo and how he could look at productionizing the code for an upcoming exhibition at Te Papa museum in Wellington. Following our conversation I invited Tim to the Expression For Art’s Sake event in Wellington the following week and the rest as you say is history. Tim was able to solve the big problem I had above and this lead to me building a V2 of my demo which I will show you soon.

Tim wrote:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

I will post again shortly with a more detailed description of how I built the demo above including source code and a preview of Version 2 inspired by Tim’s work. But in the meantime it worth calling out the great piece of software Andrea Mosaic that I purchased to pull the base 3 Gigapixel tile sets.

Read Part Two about how it was done…

ACP Media Development Leads To Pure Direction

nparker — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:32:00 GMT

I have been working with the team at ACP Media for a couple of years and finally at the Expression For Art’s Sake event at Wellington a couple of weeks ago I had a chance to catch up with Dave Harvey, Grant Archibald and Darko Zoroja to discuss their work with Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC and jQuery.

Check out the video that I shot on location at the Expression For Art’s Sake event in Wellington. In the video the guys talk about their first “Silverlight 1” development integrating video into the Auto Trader website.

Followed by a “New Car” area of the site built with ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Silverlight 2 DeepZoom (Based on the JellyFish engine).

Try out both the premium Silverlight version:

And the comparative jQuery version:

The latest site that they guys launched just this week is AA Carfair. It is based on the Auto Trader back-end and is built completely from the ground up again using ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Silverlight Video.

The guys have chosen to form a new company specialising in Silverlight development called Pure Direction which has just became a NZ BizSpark start-up, best of luck for your new venture and I look forward keeping up with your new developments.

WEB09 - ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Challenge

nparker — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:45:00 GMT

This is the first of a few posts that I am making on WEB09 in Auckland and the 'Expression For Art’s Sake’ event that we held in Wellington this month. I have over 30GB of raw video to process so it will take some time to get the stories out.

After previously mentioning that he didn’t like vendor conflict (along with throwing out a few opinions of his own) Andrew Hedges somewhat surprisingly suggested to John Ballinger that he should “pit” Adobe against Microsoft in a challenge. I must admit I’m kind of glad he did. There is nothing more challenging and rewarding than building something under pressure in the shortest of possible timeframes!

Two hours before the end of WEB09 John approached Ryan, Andrew and Paul from Adobe as well as Tim and Arturo from Microsoft to build an application from scratch to pick the winner for the WEB09 closing prize draw, below is a video I created documenting the challenge and presentations. The screen is a bit obscured so I will update the video when John releases the “official” WEB09 videos next month.

For those on a variable connection I have encoded the video for Silverlight using smooth streaming check it out at http://tr.im/smoothchallenge

You can also check it out below on Vimeo as a comparison.

The Great WEB09 'Wheel of Fortune' Challenge (download link bottom right of the page)

I got the guys to promise to release their code in the video and Arturo followed up and confirmed that it is OK for me to link to it in this blog post. It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demoware and should be treated as such. The application was built using the beta of Silverlight 3 and an early “buggy” beta of a circular control panel first shown at MIX09. That said there is nothing in this project that couldn’t have been done with Silverlight 2.

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://mo.bility.co.nz/WEB09/ to look at a running version of the solution.

Click the host character to bring up a file open prompt
Select a Text File that has a different name on each line
Click ‘Pick a Winner’

Like I’ve said before a healthy amount of cross pollination helps spark innovation

I had a conversation over dinner about working for Microsoft and attending a conference like foo I likened it to playing a game of sport... We play hard against our competition and we play to win, while others in the crowd fight with each other about who has the better team. After the game we socialise with each other are in amid of each others top players and share a common interest which is the love for the game.

I love getting to know the Adobe guys at events like WEB09 and Web On The Piste over the last couple of years. Andrews’ WEB09 session on After Effects and Sound Booth made me really want to get my hands on a copy of CS4 Master Suite to use as part of my video production process!

Ryan and Tim at dinner in Wellington after WEB09.

Update - Tim has also blogged about his experiences and a minute by minute timeline of the challenge

Update 2 - Ben Waggoner has commented on the smooth streaming video

Come see Tim Heuer present Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services Wednesday night in Wellington.

nparker — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:58:00 GMT

Following WEB09.org last week in Auckland the team is down in Wellington. On Wednesday night Tim Heuer is presenting at the Wellington .NET User Group if you live in Wellington I hope to see you there.

Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services with Tim Heuer, Silverlight PM
Wellington 22/4/2009
Gather at 5:55pm, starting at 6:00pm

Presented by Tim Heuer
Tim Heuer, Program Manager for Silverlight at Microsoft is visiting Wellington, and will be presenting at our user group! His presentation will be a tour of the upcoming Silverlight 3, and .NET RIA Services. Click Here to Register

Catering: Pizza and drinks provided
Door Charge:

Venue

Xero
Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay
Wellington
(Above Workshop, at the back of the Old Bank Arcade)
http://tr.im/iVRL

More details on the NZ DOT NET USER Group site.

Louis Vuitton Pacific Series 2009 Auckland New Zealand – The Silverlight Story

nparker — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:37:00 GMT

Introducing http://lvps09.com …

It is not everyday that the best sailors on the planet set up shop 150 metres from your work and race each other over a two week period but that is exactly what is happening for me right now.

For two weeks - 30 January to 14 February 2009 - Auckland Harbour will host yachts raced by leading international sailing teams. This time it’s a completely new regatta - the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series.

Ian Taylor contacted me just before Christmas to see if I could help his team pull off something quite special. Ian had obtained funding to broadcast the event using entirely real-time digital graphics.

Dunedin-based company Animation Research has undertaken a daring project that will see the two-week regatta broadcast entirely in a virtual format. It is believed to be a world first for a live sports broadcast.

Ian had organised to broadcast the regatta on Freeview and live streamed at TVNZ. In the rush before Christmas TVNZ, Ian and I started brainstorming to see what we could achieve for a unique web experience for the event.

When we came back in the new year it became clear that we weren’t going to be able to get extensive customisations in at TVNZ in the timeframe so Ian chose to build some race highlight packages to “show off” his vision for a rich interactive site for online sport coverage. This is where I fit in. Ian came to me with a functional Silverlight 1 prototype that his team had built that showcased his vision and it was my job at this point two weeks before the event to work with his team to “productionise” and deploy a site on Microsoft infrastructure.

Here are a couple of our early concept drawing that we discussed to “visualise” the draw and the racing that was taking place.

One of the surprise pieces that came out of this work was the “extra” section which uses a Surface Like, gesture and touch based interface. I had been experimenting with this on a HP touchsmart machine running Windows 7 and it works a treat.

To build this I leveraged Michael’s Silverlight Surface demo code. Databound it and enhanced scaling and video playback.

After showing it to professional photographers at the Louis Vuitton event they became excited about using deepzoom and this display to present some of their high resolution photos on the web, check it out. These guys sell their images so they don’t want them sitting in some in some browser cache somewhere. yeah you can still screen capture but good like putting all the small .jpg’s back together from the deepzoom.

Incidentally the “official site” for the event is built on Flash 10 (yup I had to upgrade my Flash version to view it too). The creators of this site in Paris want to link to our content to provide a “richer” experience for their audience. I thought about how to do this as the flash site doesn’t support deep linking and is a fixed size.

luckily I built a scalable UI for lvps09.com so I was very easily able to mock up a view that carried through the official site look and feel for them to link to.

If I had to list any points that I’m disappointed about to date I’d say that there are two main things.

1) I didn’t get time to move the domain to the servers where the site is being hosted so I’m using horrible domain clocking with Frames, which messes up titles and search engine optimization and doesn’t allow me to provide the IE8 meta tags or publish a web slice for the application.

2) The 3d animation video has been heavily interlaced for TV broadcast and is written to analog tape in standard definition quality before the highlight packages are created. Both TVNZ and I have struggled to make it pop on the web and you do get the horizontal lines during quick movement in the highlights.

A few things in the end made this application very flexible and extended my experiences with building production code in Silverlight 2. ~~I will do another blog post and channel9 screen cast getting into the nitty gritty details of this project once the dust has cleared a bit but~~

Download the video (104MB)

For more on Visual State Manager and Custom Controls check out Karen Corby’s fabulous blog:

below are a couple of tidbits that I just had to mention now.

1) Visual State Machine & Custom Controls ROCK!

I built a Flag control class that I could databind using LINQ. The flags were converted from Adobe Illustrator to XAML and included as states inside a custom control.

A snapshot of the xaml for this looks a bit like this…

2) LINQ binding to XML data sources makes things incredibly flexible and dynamic.

Please visit http://lvps09.com and watch some race highlights and drop any opinions, questions or comments you have about the site here.

Enjoy!

Tags: lvps09, Louis Vuitton Pacific Series, silverlight

Why is Silverlight 1 broken with Firefox 3 and how do I fix it?

nparker — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:16:00 GMT

Firefox 3 is about to be released. There is a launch party this Sunday in the US and next Thursday in Barcelona.

The original V1 Silverlight detection script ~~Firefox 3~~ has a race condition that affects the way that <object is invoked, loaded and detected. This race condition in the script has always been there but didn't occur in previous versions of the Firefox browser which meant that it remained updetected until late in the FireFox 3 development cycle.

What this means is that the forthcoming Firefox 3 release will break some Silverlight 1.0 installation experiences on web sites that use the original Silverlight 1.0 SDK Silverlight.js detection file.

The Silverlight 2 SDK has an updated Silverlight.js file that not only solves this problem for all versions of Silverlight but also eliminates browser restart that was previously needed for new installs.

You can get the SDK as part of the Install Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 or through the download center.

~~Silverlight Streaming~~ ~~will support hosting Silverlight 2 Beta 2~~ ~~later this week.~~

Update: Silverlight Streaming now supports Silverlight 2 Beta 2

If you want to link to the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Silverlight.js file hosted at Silverlight Streaming the one to use is http://agappdom.net/i/silverlight.js

~~In the mean time I have uploaded just the new Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Silverlight.js detection file to skydrive.~~

Update: Alternatively the new Silverlight.js file that works with FF3 & Silverlight 1 & Silverlight 2B2 is now at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightjs

Also you can now invoke Silverlight Streaming applications without using JavaScript at all. We support a URL syntax that directly names a self-contained web page with nothing but your Silverlight Streaming-hosted application.

You can use this URL as the source of an <iframe> tag to embed the application on sites that don’t allow JavaScript. Read more about this new feature in the SDK.

Piotr’s blog posts here and here also describe a technique that uses some simple javascript, to detect when Silverlight installation completes and launches the Silverlight content without any further user interaction or a browser restart.

Thanks,

Nigel

It Took Me Four Months But Here It Is - Thirty One Demos in Thirty Nine Minutes.

nparker — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:41:00 GMT

Four months ago I started a little project making a video out of a bunch of demos that I had been giving to different audiences over the second half of last year.

I finally finished the video over the holiday break and have today got it uploaded and live online.

I have updated my previous presentation link post...

Check out the facebook trailer (super fast)

Or watch the full video below:

1. Microsoft Research Group Shot
2. Sea Dragon (TED Video)
3. Photosynth
4. Microsoft Research HD View (Auckland, Wellington)
5. Virtual Earth (Live Labs on the Map)
6. Bill Buxton's Presentation from Expression around the Clock
7. Microsoft Surface
8. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Surface Demonstration (Video Support)
9. French Silverlight 1.0 Application (Script#)
10. Tablet Features in WPF - Inking Over Video Sample, Ink Support Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight Ink SDK Sample
11. Silverlight 1.0 Inking Search Sample
12. Live Image Search (filters)
13. Tafiti Search Visualization
14. GPS location based interactive community (Where is Frank?)
15. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Invaders - Code
16. Contoso Bicycle Club - Windows Live Quick Applications
17. Live Messenger Integration Demo - Details
18. http://backgroundmotion.com - Code/ Source Code
19. Microsoft Popfly
20. Windows Live Photo Gallery
21. Windows Home Server
22. LCI Intégrale
23. Livestation
24. WebGuide
25. hsn.tv
26. thirteen23 :: denounce
27. How About It?
28. the-hub.tv
29. Glenn Conner Interview - Amazon Demo Silverlight 1.1 Alpha
30. Building a 3D WPF Gesture Application - Code
31. Building a Video Player in 8 mins with Silverlight 1.0