What's new In the WPF 3.5 SP1 Visual Studio Editor with Erick Ellis and Mark Wilson-Thomas

nikola — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:11:00 GMT

Erick Ellis and Mark Wilson-Thomas talk about what's new in the WPF editor for Visual Studio in .NET 3.5 SP1. Topics include faster performance both from WPF and optimizations of their own, new cool visualizers, the Document Outline (very useful for WPF Apps) and more.

And as Mark mentioned, if you want to get your feedback in for future updates, go to the Visual Studio WPF Designer Forum on MSDN.

Also, this is a chance for me to show the application I built in the previous Tutorial: Create Your Own Silverlight HD Video Tutorial: From Video File to Working Silverlight Streaming Application

Create Your Own Silverlight HD Video Tutorial: From Video File to Working Silverlight Streaming Application

nikola — Sat, 17 May 2008 02:51:00 GMT

In This Tutorial

· Learn how to process video file with the Expression Encoder to prepare it for Silverlight Streaming Service

· Configure Expression Encoder Application output to work with Silverlight Streaming

Step1: Preparing Video in Expression Encoder

Download the trial from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A04DCC8C-9DB7-41CB-A27C-08CBEB0A01BA&displaylang=en

Do this:

· Click File | Import and open your video

· Select Streaming Broadband profile or another profile you may like.

I selected Streaming Broadband and then customized the bit rate and resolution to my liking.

Note: the file size must be less than 105 MB currently to work with Silverlight Streaming

· Click Output on the top-right part of the screen

· Choose a picture to be shown before the video is loaded from the Thumbnail section

· In Job Output, select a template – this will be your output application

I also unchecked Cue Video Page on load and Automatically start video when cued

· Click the Encode button on the bottom-left part of the screen

o After encoding is done, your application should load in the default browser!

Step2: Configure Application for Silverlight Streaming

· Find the output directory of the application, using the Output tab, then Job Output – look at the Directory box

· Create a manifest.xml in the output directory (folder), containing this:

<loadFunction>StartWithParent</loadFunction>

<js>MicrosoftAjax.js</js>

<js>SilverlightControl.js</js>

<js>SilverlightMedia.js</js>

<js>ExpressionPlayer.js</js>

<js>PlayerStrings.js</js>

<js>player.js</js>

<js>StartPlayer.js</js>

</jsOrder>

</SilverlightApp>

· Zip all files from the output folder, except for Default.html and Silverlight.js

· Upload the .zip file on your account at http://silverlight.live.com

You’re done!

Tips and Tricks

· If you want to update application settings (e.g. change the player background color) from within Expression Encoder, there is no need to encode the stream again:

o Click the Encode tab, then on Video select Source Profile (this will copy the un-encoded video in the application output folder)

o After the video is copied and the settings updated, add only the .js and .xaml files to the original application .zip file