Last year I saw this video at a Microsoft event.  I think you'll get a kick out of it.  The band is Magneta Lane (MySpace, FaceBook, Zune.net) doing a cover of Girl from Mars.

Your Digital Lifestyle: Girl from Mars
Video: Your Digital Lifestyle: Girl from Mars

I know it's short notice, but next week I am running a 2-day training on Expression Blend 2.5 and Silverlight 2 in San Francisco for Interactive Designers.  I have a few openings left so if you are interested in coming May 20 and 21 to the Microsoft Office in San Francisco, please contact me ASAP including your name, email, company, your role, and phone number.  The content that I will be presenting is a work-in-progress and as the intended audience is interactive designers or "devigners" (developer/designers), not developers, I hope to learn as much from the audience as they hope to learn from me.

Here's what I plan to cover:

If someone wants to come to just watch, I have a digital video camera and would love it to be recorded - that would be a great help.

Earlier this year, I created a demo that showed how to synchronized video and animation in Silverlight and put it on my $2.95/month hosted dev server.  At the Mix in March, I actually demonstrated it in the Silverlight and Advertising session.  Watch the recording below - my demo starts at 59:49.

My plans are to migrate this demonstration to Silverlight 2, but in the meantime I decided to use the MSDN Code Gallery to share the code for the site: which is primarily JavaScript and XAML:

Media Overlay Designer on MSDN Code Gallery

When building Silverlight 2 projects in Visual Studio 2008 I found that I was getting errors on building the ASP.net page:

Unknown Server Tag 'asp:Silverlight'

It turns out that I was getting the error because my project was on a network drive.  Once I moved the project to a local drive the error stopped happening.

Thank you to my colleague Marshall Agnew for that tip.

If you have ever heard of Beyond TV and thought that it might be a great product for the enterprise, you're in luck because SnapStream, the creators of Beyond TV just released SnapStream Enterprise for recording and searching TV.  One of my media customers introduced me to Rakesh Agrawal, the CEO of SnapStream at the NAB convention earlier this month and turned me on to the product.  You plug in the device (which actually runs Windows XP) into up to 10 cable inputs and it starts recording and indexing the TV feeds using the closed caption stream. 

When I saw the device working, I immediately saw the usefulness for media companies, PR firms, political campaigns, or government agencies.  I saw that if connected to SharePoint via a Business Data Catalog it could be an incredibly powerful combination.  If Basically you could search the TV archives directly from SharePoint if a Business Data Catalog were created for the SnapStream Enterprise server.  When I explained the scenario to Rakesh he was very interested but wanted to know what the interest in the SharePoint enterprise community was so I asked if I could write about it in this blog.  So here's the question:

Would the existence of a Business Data Connector for SharePoint make you more likely to purchase a SnapStream Enterprise appliance?

Put your answer in the comments of this post or contact SnapStream directly.

Last year I created a simple macro for Microsoft Outlook 2007 that automatically created an appointment from an email, adding the recipients to the appointment invite.  Apparently there has been quite a bit of interest in this, most recently someone asked if it could be modified so that it would work with the previewed email in addition to an opened email.  Well I looked at the code again and found that it was pretty easy to do: 

If the active inspector is null, then no item is opened.  I then check to see if the preview pane is visible and if it is, I get the first selected item (because only the first item is previewed). 

I have attached the updated source code for your use and productivity.  Thanks for all of your suggestions!

    ...
    Dim app As New Outlook.Application
    Dim item As Object
    
    If app.ActiveInspector Is Nothing Then
        If app.ActiveExplorer.IsPaneVisible(olPreview) Then
            Set item = app.ActiveExplorer.Selection.item(1)
        End If
    Else
        Set item = app.ActiveInspector.CurrentItem
    End If
    
    If item Is Nothing Then Exit Sub
    
    If item.Class <> olMail Then Exit Sub
    ....

Lauren Cooney at IBM came up with this idea on her blog:

What I'd like to see? An app that utilizes the Open APIs that Facebook and Twitter have so that I can figure out which of my 500 FB friends use Twitter. Anyone interested in building this for Web 2.0 Expo? If so, I'll buy you a beer next week. If you use Social Graph to build it too, that would be pretty neat... is it possible? /LC

Since I'll be at the Web 2.0 expo next week at the Silverlight Booth (April 24 & 25), I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to introduce her to Popfly our tool for creating Web 2.0 Mashups! 

I created this mashup in about a 20 minutes (I had to create a block that did the matching of names - that's why it took so long).

When I was at South by Southwest, I did lots of talking about Silverlight.  Here is an interview that I did for Web2Point0.TV about Silverlight: http://web2point0.tv/video.php?id=227

If you've ever wanted to know what a web hoster's data center looks like, I was able to have Bob Cichon, the President of CrystalTech, take me and my video camera on a tour of theirs in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

I just got a note from Patrick Tran at Reborn Studio about the performance they were getting out of ASP.Net and SQL Server for a site they built, WebRidesTV.com.  If you remember, I interviewed Patrick and his business partner Michael Marina on my team's show on Channel 9, Communicating.

Patrick tells me that with one Web Server (Intel Xeon 2.3gHz with 2GB RAM and ASP.Net 2.0) and one database server (Intel Xeon 2.3gHz with 4 GB RAM and SQL Server 2005) they were getting over 5 million page views per month.

Very Cool!

I read Billy Bragg's editorial in the New York Times about how musicians make money in the age of the Internet.  I first heard Billy Bragg twenty years ago perform live in Northampton, Massachusetts when I was a high school student attending Deerfield Academy and I've loved his music for years.  Coming back from South by Southwest his editorial seems much more relevant for me.  Where it clicked for me was when I felt the electricity in the room when Ice Cube and DJ Pooh were explaining their concept for UVNTV.com at South by Southwest.  They want to provide a non-exclusive platform on the web for anyone who has something to say:  musicians, artists, politicians, film makers.  One of the business models for the site is ad revenue - and they want to share that revenue with artists.  Other sites take notice.  And they don't want exclusive rights - just great content.

When Ice Cube and DJ Pooh were talking,  there was true excitement in the room.  I was so proud to be a part of this project, just knowing that our technology, Silverlight, is enabling their site.  The people in the audience, including many independent were genuinely enthusiastic.  Keep an eye on this one.

I just upgraded the third of my three systems to Windows Vista SP1 and all three upgrades were painless.  It took about 1 hour for each one.

My systems are 2 Lenovo T60p notebooks which are now running Windows Vista Enterprise 64-bit and one MacBook running Windows Vista Enterprise 32-bit.

Now it's your turn:

I just viewed this over a busy hotel wireless connection and I'm amazed:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/21587/

I still have so much to learn from Ben!  He's hosting the video on our free Silverlight Streaming Services and encoding with the new Expression Encoder 2 beta.

I've just survived my first South by Southwest in Austin.  It was a great time - a bit long for me though - I was at the whole festival from March 7-16 (interactive, film, and music).  The highlight of the festival for me was yesterday, starting with attending a packed interview with Ice Cube and DJ Pooh about their new UVNTV.com.  I sensed genuine buzz and excitement in the audience for what they are trying to do.  Then I had a 20-minute one-on-one interview with Ice Cube where we talked about the intersection of technology with hip-hop, music, and celebrity.  I was a bit nervous but I think it went very well.  The day was then topped off with a free live concert in Austin where Ice Cube performed and it was streamed live to UVNTV.com with Silverlight.  I was backstage during the concert and got a great look at the whole process of producing a live concert streamed to the Internet.  As far as I know (I checked all around) this was the first live streamed concert in Silverlight and it went off without a hitch.  The technical wizards who did this were from iStreamPlanet  and their expertise showed - real pros on streaming live events.

Over the next week I'm going to take it easy but I will be posting some video interviews that I took with some of the vendors that I met in the Trade Show and showing some of the backstage video that I captures to explain the live streaming process.

If you're still in Austin on 3/16 and want to meet up I'll be around since my flight doesn't leave till 5:00 PM.

Working with UVNTV.com, I've been increasingly exposed to Hip Hop music so I decided to attend a panel discussion at SxSW: Widening Hip Hop's Global Reach.  Davey D from the Bay Area lead the panel - very interesting.  One of the big takeaways that I got from SxSW was that MySpace is a key tool for any artist, but if you're an artist, you probably already knew that.  Glad to know that MySpace is built with .Net technology.