Blogging IT

Author: Laurence Moroney 

Website to Order: Microsoft Press Shop

(http://www.mspress.com.au/)

Rating: 

Let's talk Silverlight books, admittedly this is the first book (Of many I hope to get) that cover the extremely cool technology of Silverlight.  So where does this book start, well, it starts with Silverlight in Blend then Silverlight in Visual studio. Which when you think about it, covers both designers and developers quite nicely. The examples in these sections, well actually throughout the book. Are clear and easy to understand and play with and I would highly highly recommend that if you get the chance to grab this book you do so.

XAML is well explained with good examples on a lot of the technology, like video brushes...video text, yeah video text. Think about it, you have this awesome video of graphics that you cranked out using something like after effects and with Silverlight you can make a Header for your web page (Think portfolio page) with this video playing in the background. Here's an example of the code that is in the book , specifically the video brush:

Ok, so its not specifically the text from the book, as I ran it up in Blend just to make sure, you can't tell with the static picture I've put in there, but the wildlife video I've been using on my other Silverlight blog posts is running behind the words TextBlock.

As you can tell that's some pretty impressive technology that is occurring. When you include into it, that the book also covers Deep Zoom and Ink you're starting to get an idea on the potential of the book. Remember, the book is at http://mspress.com.au and to get your hands on Expression blend head to  Dreamspark and download it.

So what else does the book cover and why should you get, well the main reason for getting it, if you have any desire, any interest in Silverlight at all, then this is a great and easy read to get you into the technology to start off with. I kid you not.  Another reason it's broken down well, the first half of the book covering all of the basics which is exactly what you want to start with, it treats you as though you know nothing but that doesn't stop the book from showcasing a great amount of information that you are going to need to get it up and running. The second half of the book covers all of the advanced stuff, such as Video Brushes, Ink, Deep Zoom, creating your own Silverlight controls, Silverlight and ASP.NET controls and how to get the right presentation that you are after.

So go, get the book. :)

So let's talk about hosting Silverlight Applications and videos. First thing you want to do is go to http://silverlight.live.com/ and log in using your live account. This then sets you up for the hosting.  So your home page should look something like the image next to this paragraph.   This next blurb, straight from the page, in case you couldn't be bothered going there yet:

"To get started, click on "Manage Applications" to upload a Silverlight application and find out how to add it to your own web site; or click on "Manage Videos" and start uploading videos to your Silverlight Streaming account and then easily embed them on your blog or your web site.

Please note that Silverlight Streaming is currently a Beta release. Features and/or service availability is subject to change."

Do not be put off by that, Google's GMAIL system was in beta for about 5 years and was rock solid. Microsoft wouldn't be offering hosting services unless it was rock solid.

Now, I have a couple of videos that I want to have hosted, and I'll work on the assumption that is one of the reasons why you are reading this Blog, so you can see how easy it is. First things first, time to click on Manage Videos. There's a nice simple link in the centre of the page called "Upload a Video", Time to follow the bouncing ball, so to speak. Looks pretty straight forward, tick the box only after you are sure that the video is of the right file format, browse and then upload away. The video I'll be uploading is the one I turned into a Silverlight player app in the last blog entry.   Excellent, a nice and simple upload screen appears to help provide feedback on the experience of uploading.

All of this so far, is very run of the mill for pretty much any video site that has been around, YouTube anyone!! Which is quite a good design philosophy when it comes to the web familiarity is a good thing. The window is similar to the one you see when copying files on your desktop. After the copying has been completed, you'll be returned to the Manage Videos section with your file listed.

Now click on the name of the video you've uploaded, this takes you to a new page with various options on how to display this video. As listed below.

Method 1: Embed the video into a web page.

1) Insert the following HTML where you want the video to appear in the body of the page:

Method 2: Link directly to the video.

1) Use the following link in a web page or a Silverlight application:

As you can see, I inserted the iframe code just above method 2, and I ended up with a default Silverlight player. With standard controls. Go to the start, go to the end, play, stop. If you double click on the video when playing it enters full screen mode. There's also a volume control, which is handy to have. The size of the embedded video is based upon the height and width used on iframe code. To make it smaller, you would shrink the numbers.

Well, that was a bit easy wasn't it. But this was just a simple video with the default player.  Well look at customised players another day, it's time for me to get back to work. Have a good one.

Ok, so you've seen some parts of Silverlight, but where's the rich media experience? Well, that can be found by using Expression Encoder 2. I mean let's face facts, nothing screams rich media like a video.  And Encoder has some pretty awesome templates to make the player look fantastic. So let's go through the "hard" part of making an embedded web video player in Silverlight.

Ok, open up Expression Encoder, you should see a blank workshop and a few menu sections.  The way to do this, is use the import button in the bottom left, click on that and then find your video you want to setup. Once you've imported it, run through the menu options presented, top right. Hit the Output tab and change the template to something you like.

  Personally, I really like the Quicksilver template. Now, to complete the process, hit the encode button next to your import. So what happens now? Well, the system converts the video into a smaller more web manageable size. It generates all of the additional html and javascript needed to play it.

Once it has finished doing the conversion, Encoder will open up your default web browser and playback the video. I've opened it up in Internet Explorer so you can have a look at the file. As you  may have noticed, it opened it up to full screen mode, well, that's all well and good if that is all that you are going to show, but a lot of the times, you're going to want to have a smaller video (By the way, the video I use is the default sample video found in Windows 7) preview as you will want to display a lot of text around it.

So how do we shrink the video? Well this is where you open up the default.html file in Expression Web (You have downloaded the Expression 2 suite from www.dreamspark.com haven't you :)   ) From here you change the height from 100% to whatever number you choose, I selected 25% This is on the divplayer section

. When I hit the refresh on  my browser, we get the following picture. 

Now before you think, well, that's kinda made it all hard to see, remember the template I decided upon (Quicksilver), well the cool part about that template is that if you run the mouse over the video you get a bunch of controls. Standard controls such as play/stop/fast forward/rewind, volume up & down and a dragging timeline though the video so you can speed past bits. There is also a full screen option. Which on my 25.5" monitor it looks down right awesome.

So what do we have now, well, we have a Silverlight player with the video of our choice ready to go, if you have some web page knowledge you can use div tags and css coding to position the video anywhere on your web page. The trick to making it really useful for your web page is to embed the default.html file that was generated for you into an <iframe></iframe> tag and position that with css. From here you can place the web page(and the contents of the Silverlight generated content) either on your server if you have one or you can get Microsoft to host your Silverlight pages for you. This hosting can be done at http://silverlight.live.com/ I suggest you use this service as it gives you 10Gb of hosting Silverlight applications for nothing and the streaming you do comes from Microsoft's datacentre.

Hmm, I might show how to get the hosting and streaming next blog.

See told you it was hard. hahahahaha joking joking :)

Wow, what an interesting morning, we’ve confirmed that a fresh install on a laptop (1.67Ghz 2Gb Ram) takes about 20-30 minutes where as installs as a virtual machine take way longer.

Windows 7 also runs really well on a Macbook, one install was as a parallels install and the other bootcamp version. I’ve asked both Mac guys to send me an email after a few weeks to let me know how well win 7 is working on their respective machines.

Once we had our first machine up and running with Win 7, we tested out a few of the features, though first up, we were amazed at how well the system was responding, we had multiple windows open, IE 8, wordpad, paint, titans chess, control panel, about 4 explorer windows and the machine did not miss a beat. Wit that amount of windows open, showcased the ‘window wiggle’ which is when you click on the title bar of an application and shake it from side to side.  It minimized all of the other windows in the background, cute. Also re-shaking it brings them back up.

Dragging one application to the side and another to the other side, docked them neatly side by side, we tested this with wordpad, IE 8. IE 8 and games. It was nice to see that the Operating system didn’t judge on the application open. Also a nice one is when you drag a non maximised up to the top of the screen, how it maximises the app for you.

All in all, it was a lot of fun, with a multitude of prizes being given away (Thanks Karo[Microsoft] for supplying them. We had students from different campus’s who came down for the install and took back a few DVDs to share.

It’s bigger and better than before. I’ve 50 32Bit x86 Versions to give away/install and 10 64bit x64, in addition to other prizes. First in, best dressed so they say.

We will start the morning installing the latest available public build of Windows 7 on your test computer, (preferably laptop), that meets the minimum configuration listed below.  We will run through some of the key improvements that have been made from the user perspective and we’ll also take a look at some of the great new features Windows 7 has to better manage your computers in the corporate environment.

System Requirements:

Make sure your desktop or laptop meets these minimum requirements:

• • 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
• • 1 GB of system memory
• • 16 GB of available disk space
• • Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme)
• • DVD-R/W Drive

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• The system WILL BE WIPED, (unless you use virtualization), so do NOT bring systems that have any data on them that you wish to keep.
• If you decide to bring a Desktop Computer please review the following:
  • We will NOT be providing monitors, keyboards, mice, or any associated cables, including power cables, so make sure you bring the required hardware to run your system.
  • Get there early as you will likely need a little more time to setup than the users.
  • We will NOT have any hand trucks or carts to help you bring equipment in so, please come prepared.
• There will be no ongoing support for the pre-release software after the loadfest. We will, however, make a best effort on the day to get your system up and running.
• There will be 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 Beta DVDs available*. (while supplies last)

LOCATION

Griffith University Microsoft Student Partner
Venue: Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, G23 1.21

When: Thursday 28th May
Time: 9am till 11am

Website: http://seancostain.spaces.live.com/

RSVP: email seancostain@student-partners.com.au

Hope to see you there.