Welcome To the Future

I had a taste of the future today, the future that we already live in. It all started when Microsoft's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb started tweeting about behind-the-scenes goings on at the lead up to Microsoft's CES Keynote. His tweet read, "Steve B is just walked by me...wearing a very red sweater . We are getting ready to start". Steve B in this instance is Steve "Developers, developers, developers" Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, who was to do the talking at the keynote.

Things got more interesting as I started to watch the live stream of the keynote which was being pushed out across the internet from Las Vegas to anyone with a browser and the Silverlight plugin. The audio level was pretty low and I had to bump my system volume up to maximum in order to hear what was going on. Then Major Nelson tweeted this, "Told the stream dudes about the audio level. They're fixing"... was he in my head? No, other watchers had tweeted back to Major Nelson about the audio level.

The left channel dropped out then came back as the right channel then dropped out. When the audio stream returned in stereo at a much improved level The Major asked, "Let me know how the audio is....they tweaked it." Myself, and I'm sure many others, replied to say that all was good which prompted Larry to offer up a final tweet on the subject, "I brought the streaming to my PC to see your tweets about audio. You guys helped fix it :)"

It was at that moment that I really thought about what was going on. It might sound like ordinary day-to-day goings on but seriously, I was watching a live video of Microsoft's head honcho half way around the world giving a speech to thousands of people while at the same time I was communicating directly with another Microsoft senior employee who was doing techy stuff in the wings. Can you imagine doing that just a few years ago? We really are living in the future.

Quake In Your Browser Not Your Boots

It looks like some whacky folks have gone and ported ye olde Quake over to Microsoft's Silverlight. You can sit and watch the demo run but as soon as you try to load up a new game it just hangs. No audio yet either. Still, pretty cool.

Check it out on the Innoveware website: http://www.innoveware.com/ql/640/QuakeLight.html, or watch the video below.

Note, this isn't video playback it's the actual game engine running in Silverlight. You can read more about it here.

Silverlight 2 Is Out, Go Get It!

Quick, before they release another version! Go get your fresh copy of the FULL RELEASE of Microsoft Silverlight 2. Yes, Microsoft has finally finished fluffing around with beta version after beta version and have cooked up this final release of their multimedia web delivery thing.

Please note, if you do any Silverlight development you'll need to install the final release of the Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 before attempting to install Silverlight 2..

How To Get IIS To Serve Silverlight Content

I recently had success setting up IIS6 to serve Silverlight content. I got the info from a poster at this forum who had this to say.

It was really hard for me to find the settings needed to configure a server to "serve" Silverlight applications. So I've posted them here. Hopefully it will help someone else.

These are really for WPF, but they worked fine for me with deploying Silverlight applications. The key ones are highlighted in a bold green.

You must register several MIME types and file extensions so that the browser on the client's system can load the correct handler. You need to add the following types:

Extension	MIME Type
.manifest	application/manifest
.xaml	application/xaml+xml
.dll	application/x-msdownload
.application	application/x-ms-application
.xbap	application/x-ms-xbap
.deploy	application/octet-stream
.xps	application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument
.xap	application/x-silverlight-app

Note: You do not need to register MIME types or file extensions on client systems

Another poster at on another forum had this to say also...

"I had the same problem and I've set the IIS server to "script only" insted of "scripts and executables" "

VBS to automatically set it up is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752346.aspx

So there you go. That should be enough to get your IIS server serving Silverlight (say that 10 times fast!).

Bloody Beta Releases

Man, I knew better than this but I still went ahead with it. I'd spent a while working with Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and just as everything was working nicely what happens? Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is released and, oh what's that? Everythings f***king broken now! Even the Deep Zoom images. Oh, and the Silverlight player requires an update to play the new stuff (natch) but it will no longer play beta 1 content... WTF!? I also had to uninstall and reinstall the Deep Zoom Composer and update Expression Blend. Here's another poor sucker who was mucking about with Beta 1 and has had to rejig all their code. I think I'll just wait for the RTM release before touching it again.

Automate Silverlight Deep Zoom Composer

At Remix08 one of the presenters mentioned a Deep Zoom API which sounded just grand and perfect for something I was working on. I just had a quick search for said API and it apparently doesn't exist (yet) but according to one of the other presenters there on the day you can hook directly into the guts of the Deep Zoom Composer to do it your own way (with a bit of fiddling).

Just to prove it works, the Live Labs guys have created their own demo site called PhotoZoom that lets you generate Deep Zoomable images on the fly.