Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer

Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development

Tim Heuer — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:00:12 GMT

So the news is out!

Silverlight IS the platform for Windows Phone 7 Series development!

Sweet. We also made available an update to Silverlight 4 that you might be interested in too!

You may be wondering how you get started. If you are new to Silverlight, I recommend getting familiar with Silverlight first. You can find all the tools you will need at the Silverlight community site. In addition to the core tools you’ll want to get the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. This will add to your Visual Studio 2010 installation (or install Visual Studio Express) to enable Windows Phone and XNA Game Studio development. Be sure to read the documentation on the release notes to understand any limitations. A link to the tools, documentation, developer/UX guides and more can be found on the Silverlight for Windows Phone page. The key elements you’d want to get are:

Windows Phone developer tools CTP (read the release notes)
Expression Blend 4 add-on for Windows Phone (Christian Schormann’s blog)

I’ve also taken some quick time to get some quick videos up for some tips and familiarity with the tools and some initial areas you’ll want to take a look at. Here are some starting videos for you:

The getting started video has some quick tips and tricks about the emulator and using the keyboard input control (referred to as the ‘SIP’). I suggest taking a look at these for some primer. If you have questions afterwards, check out the dedicated forum for Silverlight for Windows Phone.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ll develop using Silverlight for Windows Phone! Be sure also to watch for @ckindel and @wp7dev on Twitter for information about Windows Phone 7 Series development.

tags: silverlight, ria, xaml, xna, wp7dev, wp7, windows-phone, windows phone, winmo

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

A guide to what has changed in the Silverlight 4 RC

Tim Heuer — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:24:28 GMT

At MIX10, Silverlight 4 released an update, the Silverlight 4 RC (release candidate). A few things have changed since the beta which was released in November. If you haven’t read my guide to Silverlight 4 you may want to check that out. The features still exist, but there are some changes to the implementations of some of the features as well as some new ones. Please go read the previous post to familiarize yourself with the features. This post will be complimentary to that and identify new/changed.

First let’s get you going with the tools:

Visual Studio 2010 RC
Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and WCF RIA Services).
Silverlight Toolkit March 2010 Release (coming soon)
WCF RIA Services Toolkit
Expression Blend 4 beta (note: existing Blend 3 licensed users will get this as a free upgrade)
BREAKING CHANGES DOCUMENTATION – read this
Windows Phone Developer tools

And since sometimes people just want to get going with learning resources here’s my top suggestions:

Silverlight learning videos for Silverlight 4 (3 new feature ones added)
Silverlight 4 hands-on-labs – major updates including an 8-part business application lab
Silverlight 4 books – check out what you can pre-order from the experts

So here we go, here’s my brain dump of some key areas of what you’ll be seeing in the Silverlight 4 RC. This is not all-inclusive, but I think a list of some that most will want to know about.

Changed	New
RichTextBox improvements WebBrowser control Printing API enhancements Native automation (COM interop) Language/Script support Networking and Sockets User consent dialog on webcam/clipboard/etc.	XAP Signing Custom window chrome for trusted applications Pinned full-screen mode WCF RIA Services Toolkit ContextMenu control SLLauncher silent installs

A quick note about Visual Studio 2010 RC

The Silverlight 4 tools linked above target the RC release of Visual Studio. There have been 2 patches to Visual Studio 2010 RC since it’s release. It is recommended that you have these two patches installed prior to installing the Silverlight tools. Information about these patches (and links to them) is available here.

RichTextBox (the control formerly known as RichTextArea)

Silverlight 4 introduced a new control for enabling editing and display of rich text. (See original details here for RichTextArea.) A few things have changed here, one key one being the name: RichTextBox. This was to be more consistent with WPF and also based on your feedback. Additional improvements were also enabling the ability to get the XAML that makes up the underlying runs and paragraph of the rich text. This is helpful for saving off the data and re-hydrating later if desired. It’s a simple property on the RichTextBox control (assuming the control name is ‘MyRichContent’):

   1: string richText = MyRichContent.Xaml;

In addition to that, there are also some new text selection and position APIs to enable you programmatically select text and/or know where the current position of the text is located. This is best demonstrated in the ‘Silverlight Notepad’ sample application in the hands-on-lab area where you can see examples of it being used.

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WebBrowser control

The beta provided us with a mechanism for hosting HTML content within an out-of-browser application. This is still available to us, however some APIs have changed. The HtmlBrush is now called the WebBrowserBrush to be consistent in naming and what it actually does.

You can view a video on using the WebBrowser control here.

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Printing API enhancements

The printing API was enhanced to help developers query for the printer page size and the printable area. Another change was where the ‘document name’ is provided. It is now required and a part of the Print() method. Before:

   1: PrintDocument doc = new PrintDocument();

   2: doc.DocumentName = "Sample Document";

   3: doc.Print();

After:

   1: PrintDocument doc = new PrintDocument();

   2: doc.Print("Sample Document");

You can view a video on using the printing APIs here.

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Native automation (COM interop)

API changes in the naming of the native integration (COM interop) feature for trusted applications. Before:

   1: dynamic excel = ComAutomationFactory.CreateObject("Excel.Application");

After:

   1: dynamic excel = AutomationFactory.CreateObject("Excel.Application");

Simple, but will catch you in a recompile :-). You can view a video on using native integration here.

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Language/script support

Silverlight now has extended language support, including Thai and Vietnamese. Additionally we added support for multiple Indic scripts. The following Indic scripts are now supported:

Script	Language
Bengali	Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri
Oriya	Oriya
Malayalam	Malayalam
Kannada	Kannada
Tamil	Tamil
Telugu	Telugu
Gujarati	Gujarati
Gurmukhi	Punjabi
Devanagari	Hindi, Marathi, Sanskirt, Konkani, Kashmiri, Nepali, Sindhi

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Networking

In the beta, socket ports were still being restricted in trusted applications. In this release, the port restriction for socket ranges in trusted applications is removed.

Additionally, the client networking stack (ClientHttp) has been enhanced to enable UploadProgress reporting and caching support.

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User consent dialogs (webcam/clipboard/etc.)

We call those dialogs that require user permissions ‘consent dialogs.’ Your users will see these whenever code requires things like requesting device access for webcam/microphone, clipboard access, or quota increase for IsolatedStorage. In the beta we showed these dialogs always and didn’t have a mechanism for enabling the user to determine if they wanted their consent preference saved. That has changed in this release. Consent dialogs now give the user the option to remember the setting which is persisted to their preferences only for that application and is in their control. Here’s the new consent dialog for clipboard, webcam and full-screen pinning:

And if you look at the Silverlight configuration dialog you’ll notice a permissions tab now where these permissions are set for the user, which they can change or delete:

This consent dialog ‘remember my preference’ setting is not available for IsolatedStorage quote increase however. It doesn’t make sense to enable that really for that scenario.

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XAP Signing for trusted applications

We think trusted applications (or elevated privileges applications) will be a widely used feature for this release. We changed the install prompt dialog for trusted applications. These are different dialogs than the typical out-of-browser install prompt as we need the user to have more information provided about them. One key feature of a trusted application is the ability to code-sign the XAP file. Here’s a trusted application install prompt from an un-signed application:

Windows:

Mac OSX:

And here is one from a code-signed one:

Windows:

Mac OSX:

Which would you feel more comfortable installing? Notice that in signed applications your custom icon will show as well (even if you have the icon settings set up, if the app is unsigned they will not show). The process of code signing is very simple and although I expect the tooling for Silverlight to improve on this, it is as simple as adding a post-build event task (or a task for automated builds) that uses the signtool.exe (installed with Visual Studio) to sign the XAP. Here’s my post-build event task:

   1: "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\signtool.exe" sign /v

   2:     /f c:\users\timheuer\documents\authenticode\timheuer.pfx

   3:     /p "MYPASSWORD"

   4:     /t TIMESTAMP_URI_FROM_PROVIDER $(TargetName).xap

The PFX file is an exported certificate with my private key and password protected. You can acquire code-signing certificates (normal Authenticode ones) from providers. We were thankful to get assistance in testing this feature from the following providers who can provide you code-signing certificates for your organization:

All of the above provide Authenticode code-signing certificates and are trusted certificate authorities (CA) on Windows. A trusted CA means that their root certificates are already a part of Windows verification. The process of obtaining one is not instant so plan ahead. There is a specific organizational verification process that occurs which may require documentation of proof of the organization and a few phone calls. Once you have these certificates you will be on your way to providing even more trusted applications to your users.

NOTE: Thawte code-signing certificate requests should be made from a Windows XP machine as their current process does not support Windows Vista or Windows 7. If you use Vista/7 you will not be able to export to a PFX file for automated build or to have your certificate stored on other machines. Read each instructions carefully.

You can also sign your XAP using self-signed certificates. If you do so, it is likely that you are not a trusted CA on machines and would have to instruct your users further. In my opinion, it is better to acquire a trusted CA cert for external applications. Take a look at Jeff Wilcox’s epic post on Code Signing 101.

A special note on trusted applications…please read! If you want to take advantage of using the update features of Silverlight for your application (aka CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync), then your application must be signed. If you do not sign your XAP for a trusted application it cannot auto-update. Self-signed works here to, but don’t get your application in a state where it cannot be updated automatically!

You can view a video walk-through of XAP signing here.

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Custom window chrome

One of the more requested features of trusted applications is the ability to customize the ‘chrome’ around the window. The chrome area refers to the standard OS-specific border and title bar that a typical out-of-browser application will receive. In this release we give you the ability to customize this for your users. The Visual Studio tools also build in the capability to make this easier for you:

You can see there are a few options to choose from for window types. Right now we do not support transparent windows or irregular shapes but are aware of the desire to have these. Here’s an example of the Facebook client before:

and with custom window chrome:

You’ll notice that in the custom window mode that since you don’t have the OS-specific title bar with minimize/maximize/close that you’ll be responsible for doing that. That also includes handling the window moving and resizing events. We enable APIs for you to do all of this easily.

You can view a video on customizing window chrome and handling resizing and moving here.

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Pinned full-screen mode

Are you a developer with multiple monitor setup? I’m jealous. If you’ve used silverlight you’ve no doubt run into a situation where you’ve put something in full-screen on one monitor and anticipated being able to work on other stuff in the other monitor. Maybe you’re watching a Netflix movie while working? You’ve likely experienced the issue that the full-screen mode goes back to regular when activity occurs in the second monitor.

We’ve changed that to enable the developer to prompt for permission to 'pin’ the Silverlight application to the monitor. This will prompt the consent dialog option (with preference remembering) to get the user’s permission. The code is extremely simple:

   1: App.Current.Host.Content.FullScreenOptions = System.Windows.Interop.FullScreenOptions.StaysFullScreenWhenUnfocused;

Once that is implemented, the full-screen application will remain pinned until the user hits ESC key or until you change the IsFullScreen mode in the code for them.

You can view a video on using the full-screen pinning mode here.

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ContextMenu control

In the beta we introduced the right-click event handling capabilities. In most cases this would be used by developers to implement context menus. The Silverlight Toolkit for March 2010 release now provides a ContextMenu control for you to use and wire-up for this event. It’s similar to the one Jesse Bishop created for the beta, so if you’ve used that it should be familiar. It also supports ICommand too!

You can get the ContextMenu control and other great controls by ensuring you download and install the Silverlight Toolkit March 2010 release.

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SLLauncher silent installs

One of the features we added in this release was using the sllauncher.exe (which is the program that assists in out-of-browser applications) to provide silent install capabilities for your applications. The primary scenario here would be something like CD-based installation situations. Using a command like this:

   1: "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight\sllauncher.exe"

   2:     /install:"D:\deploy\demoapp.xap"

   3:     /origin:"http://foocompany.com/apps/ClientBin/demoapp.xap"

   4:     /shortcut:desktop+startmenu

   5:     /overwrite

would enable you to deploy an application in this type of a situation. Setting the origin flag here enables the application to determine where it would get future updates from if CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync methods are called within the application.

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WCF RIA Services Toolkit

If you read above you’ll know that installing the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio also automatically installs the WCF RIA Services framework for you. This release the RIA Services team also has a toolkit of their own. After installing the RIA Services Toolkit you’ll get:

LinqToSql DomainService
SOAP endpoint – enabling exposing a SOAP endpoint for your DomainService
JSON endpoint – enabling exposing a JSON endpoint for your DomainService
ASP.NET DomainDataSource – enabling your ASP.NET application to talk to your DomainService

This is a separate install that you must complete. For more details on this toolkit, visit Deepesh’s blog.

If you aren’t familiar with WCF RIA Services, you can view an introductory video here.

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Summary

It’s been a fast pace since getting the Silverlight 4 beta in your hands in November. We’ve had a lot of work to do to finish things up and implement some new key features. We are very excited about this release of Silverlight 4 for developers and look forward to seeing the great applications you build with it!

Be sure to visit the MIX10 site for video recordings of various Silverlight-related presentations as the event is happening and as reference later on! I really encourage you to view the keynote to see some new consumer-facing application experiences built on Silverlight, like eBay, Associated Press (Windows Phone 7)

Hope this helps! Be sure to subscribe here via RSS or email and if you’re on Twitter you can follow me there as well for Silverlight updates/resources

tags: silverlight, xaml, riaservices, ria, mix, mix10, sllauncher, xap, wpf

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SNEAK PEEK: New Silverlight application themes

Tim Heuer — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:22:28 GMT

‘Twas the week before MIX, when all through the tubes
Not a developer was sleeping, not even the noobs.

The laptops were paved removed of their glitz
In hopes that they soon will get some new bits.

A developer was coding, building an app
Trying to build the next greatest XAP

Battleship gray?! Now that’s obscene
Check our designers’ latest theme

Okay, so I’m not going to win any poetry awards. Our UX design team for Silverlight has been thinking about app building a lot this past year, gathering valuable input from developers, designers and end-users about how people interact with applications, primarily line-of-business applications (<shudder>I hate that term</shudder>). Hot off the press here is a preview of some of the things we’ve been thinking about from a XAML theme perspective.

First, I present to you codename Grayscale. Some subtle twists on existing base themes but not detracting too much from the ‘traditional’. (larger view here).

Up next is codename Windows Theme (yeah, original I know, gimme a break here I’m making these up). Taking a cue from Windows 7 system design, this theme brings familiarity to the end-user. (larger view here).

And finally, Metro. Taking a cue perhaps from Zune desktop (and device) software design, a clean but fun theme for any application (larger view here).

So there you have some preview of some Silverlight application themes we’ve been playing around with. I know the design team is enthusiastic about getting these in the hands of developers/designers.

What do you think?

tags: silverlight, xaml, themes, templating, templates, metro, riaservices, ria, wpf

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Learning the M-V-VM pattern for XAML development

Tim Heuer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:17:04 GMT

Quick, what’s the most popular thing in XAML development? Yeah, thought so…MVVM or Model-View-ViewModel.

It’s one of the most popular subjects I hear about when people talk about developing applications with WPF and Silverlight. However, as much as it is talked about and as much as frameworks are born every day, there isn’t a ton of just simplified ‘here’s how you do it’ information in one place. I mean, sure there *is* information, but I have to admit I think it is a bit scattered all over.

One of the pioneers of promoting this pattern for WPF development, Josh Smith, took some time to try to solve that. Josh has recently released a self-published book titled Advanced MVVM and is a quick and good read about the pattern.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Josh presented me with a complimentary printed copy of this book a few weeks ago. I had already intended on purchasing it when available on Amazon Kindle and have since done so. In the nature of ensuring I share the love and complimentary goodies, Josh allowed me to give away my printed copy to someone, which I did at a Silverlight user group meeting just last night. I’m grateful Josh provided me with a printed copy and also grateful he encouraged me to give it as a prize.

The book is about 50-ish printed pages and is a quick read. It covers creating a simple and common game, Bubble Burst, using the MVVM pattern. The code is all WPF, but the concepts still apply to Silverlight development and Josh points out some areas where there are differences.

All of the code discussed in the book is available to download so that you can work with starting projects as you go throughout the book learning the pattern. Josh covers all the key topics of the pattern you would expect: ViewModel, View, Commands, etc. One of the things that Josh is good about is not being a zealot of the pattern. He’s quick to point out that when code belongs with the View and when he thinks it doesn’t.

When doing development I always think it is a great idea to have some solid references on your shelf. No matter where you are in your skill set, there will always be those times when you want to refer back to something you may have forgotten or perhaps get a different perspective on a specific way of doing things. For MVVM development, I think this is one such reference.

On a side note, Josh got a lot of crap for his initial chosen method of distribution (Lulu digital, which uses a DRM PDF). He quickly responded and offered a printable copy as well as put it on Amazon for Kindle distribution (which I bought and can read on my Kindle, my phone or my PC…note: phone and PC are in color too). There are a multitude of ways you can get the title all of which are listed at the AdvancedMVVM.com web site which also lists a table of contents for the book. If you are doing Silverlight or WPF development you should pick it up, read it and keep it handy. It’s not the only opinion, of course, but it is a great presentation of the pattern relevant to the development platform that I’ve seen.

Recommend.

tags: mvvm, wpf, xaml, silverlight, m-v-vm, mvp

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Smashing Magazine March 2010 Windows 7 Theme

Tim Heuer — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:44:40 GMT

It’s that time again…beginning of a new month! That means that Smashing Magazine has released their monthly wallpaper pictures again.

Not as many St. Patrick’s themed ones as I would have expected. Here are your March 2010 Windows 7 Theme Packs for the wallpapers though…including all images (note: some ‘without calendar’ images are not provided by the authors) unfiltered.

For details on these and to see past ones, visit the Smashing Magazine Windows 7 Theme information for the specifications I used for the theme pack as well as previous themes. Want to participate and submit yours? Join in!

NOTE: I know last month had some issues with the .themepack files. I tested these ones on 2 computers and was able to install them. My previous issue appears to have been with creating the packs on a 64-bit machine which I’m investigating with the Windows team.

Special thanks to the Windows Team Blog for hosting these theme packs for us all!

tags: smashingmagazine, smashingmag, smashing, windows 7, win7, windows, wallpaper, themes

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Silverlight MVPs of the Year (2009)

Tim Heuer — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:35:04 GMT

This week at Microsoft we are hosting roughly 1,300 of our top community experts around the world in various technical competencies. For Silverlight, we have about 80% of our group in attendance from all over the world.

At the beginning of the year the Silverlight team asked our MVP group to identify the individuals within their group have done a lot for Silverlight community and that they would consider worthy of being named an ‘MVP of the year’ award.

First to be clear, ALL of our MVPs are top notch and all have contributed significantly to the Silverlight community both professionally and personally. It is really exciting to see this level of commitment to community these folks have. You should take a moment and check out these folks using the Twitter list that John Papa has put together.

Out of this group of experts, they have peer selected the following individuals for 2009 as their ‘Silverlight MVPs of the Year’ – please join me in congratulating:

Laurent Bugnion (blog, Twitter)
Dave Campbell (blog, Twitter)

These two were identified by their peers and the Silverlight team as contributing significantly to the Silverlight community/ecosystem over this past year. Laurent has one of the most definitive books on Silverlight (and is working on an updated edition) as well as releasing one of his projects, MVVM Light – a Model-View-ViewModel framework for Silverlight developers to help them get quickly started with MVVM pattern development. Dave has saved us all the searching in the world and continues to scour, validate and surface some of the best Silverlight content around the world in his Silverlight Cream blog – providing a daily post of aggregation of all the cool things happening in the Silverlight community.

Take a moment to subscribe/read/whatever to our Silveright MVPs – they are the folks keeping us honest :-)

Congratulations Laurent, Dave and all the MVPs for the efforts you have accomplished over this past year – looking forward to continued efforts this year!

tags: silverlight, ria, riaservices, xaml, wpf, mvp

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Big companies changing the English language – an open letter to advertisers

Tim Heuer — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:51:59 GMT

Something has been bugging me lately. I feel I’ve become complacent. And I think you have as well. We all are surrounded by advertising daily. Whether it be in print, audio or video, it is always near us in everything we do. You cannot escape it…nobody can escape it.

Not even our children.

Perhaps this is what is driving my ~~frustration~~ anger. You see, I have two kids ages 7 and 3. My daughter (7) is in her second year of elementary school. My son (3) is in pre-school. Both are learning various things. But learning also means questioning…A LOT! Sometimes as a parent it can actually be frustrating the amount of questions you get! But it is an opportunity to help my kids’ education and supplement with my own assistance, beliefs and perhaps help them further understand the things they are learning.

Ask yourself this…if your kids came to you and asked Daddy, what does ‘free’ mean? how would you define it? What about unlimited? My guess is that you will revert back to your own education and answer accordingly. My guess is that you would not use the term ‘sometimes’ when defining these terms. In fact, I would guess you’d follow that giant book of definitions we call the dictionary to assist you.

Here is how the term ‘unlimited’ is defined:

unlimited:

not limited; unrestricted; unconfined

boundless; infinite; vast

without any qualification or exception

And here is ‘free’:

free:

provided without, or not subject to, a charge or payment

given without consideration of a return or reward

not costing or charging anything

not subject to rules, set forms, etc

Now I think any reasonable adult would agree as to this is your understanding of these terms. I think you know where I’m going here. We’re constantly surrounded by things that contradict not only our teachings to our children, but the literally meaning of things. I’m not complaining about belief systems and things that are subjective in nature…I’m talking about the definition of words here.

The problem is that we and the elected government we have are allowing this to occur.

WHY?

Allow me to provide some examples.

Recently on the radio I heard an advertisement for getting a free laptop. It was surrounded by all sorts of testimonials of people who have gotten their laptop. I was waiting for the hitch. You know the fast speak at the end that tells you all the terms and you can’t decipher them because you couldn’t possibly hear them how fast they talk (the audio equivalent of ‘fine print’). There was none. Of course I was suspicious. Of course I knew it wasn’t free…but my daughter heard the same ad as well and said Dad, it’s free, I want a laptop. I was stuck. In reviewing their site, freeuslaptop.com you see the banner add with ‘participation required’ listed.

Then in the fine print you read:

In order to receive your gift you must: (1) Meet the eligibility requirements (2) complete the rewards bonus survey (3) complete a total of 13 Sponsor Offers as stated in the Gift Rules (4) Follow redemption instructions.

The ‘Sponsor Offers’ of which you have to complete a total of 13 of them are things that are not free (one exception I could see). Completing 13 of these would surely cost you a couple hundred dollars at least…maybe even enough to buy a decent used laptop on craigslist.

There is nothing that matches the English language of free in here at all. The ‘free’ is bound to so many offers that are, in fact, bound to costs, subject to rules, charge payment. There is no way anyone can look at me with a straight face and tell me that this is free at all.

You see these ‘free’ deals all over the place. Mobile telephone carriers use this tactic as well with offering ‘free’ phones (in exchange for your commitment to a 2-year cost contract – again, ‘subject to rules’).

Now let’s talk about ‘unlimited’ – this one also points most recently to the mobile phone industry for me. I’ve been seeing advertisements on television about unlimited internet plans. Of course television advertisements are the worst because of the fine print. I have a large 50” HD screen and I still can’t read the paragraph of text in 4px blurred font that is displayed on the screen. Why we feel this is an acceptable advertising practice is beyond me.

Of course, as a tech savvy person, you know that there is no such thing as ‘unlimited’ broadband. It is another advertising shield for a bait to get you. Unlimited to mobile carriers in the US is now defined as 5GB of usage. Granted for most that should be way more than enough…but is that unrestricted as the definition of unlimited suggests? Absolutely not – in fact they are defining the restriction of the unlimited deal.

Now all the online terms for the plans clearly spell this out (and not in fine print) so that is great. But they are preying on the fact that people don’t pay attention to that. I was trying to find one of the recent advertisements TV add on YouTube, but couldn’t (if someone finds one post it below). One of my local carriers, Cricket, has a data plan that reads:

Now your laptop or desktop computer can have unlimited high-speed wireless Internet access on Cricket's 3G network.

However, here’s their lovely footnote at the very bottom:

Throughput speed may be limited if usage adversely impacts our network, service levels or exceeds 5 GB per month.

Hmm, sounds an awful lot like a restriction to me.

So what can be done? Doesn’t seem like a lot without significant pressure to the FTC about these practices. The FTC web site and process for complaining isn’t intuitive and isn’t really consumer friendly either. A lot has been done about the mobile carrier ‘unlimited’ stuff – I see online the more prominent placement of specific data plans and very few are using the term unlimited anymore. Still, this hasn’t changed their mainstream advertising channels like audio/video outlets.

I just hope that we’d all stop being so complacent about how we look at these things. It’s becoming hard to explain to my children the oddities of how companies are redefining words and what my kids know to be true.

Rant over…had to get it off my chest how frustrated I am at these types of deceptive practices. If you can’t succeed with your product by being honest, then your product sucks.

tags: freeuslaptop, free, unlimited, ftc

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Using Silverlight Media Framework for simple playback

Tim Heuer — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:09:06 GMT

If you aren’t aware of the Silverlight Media Framework, you should take a look. This is a media playback framework for Silverlight that is based off of a lot of best practices from such implementations as the NBC Olympics, Sunday Night Football and others.

It has a lot of features built-in to the framework such as:

Logging
DVR-style features
Fast forward
Slow motion
Media Markers
etc

Basic stuff plus some great included features and extensibility points.

Missing Features – Part 1

What I didn’t like in v1 was two things: it was only for Smooth Streaming and it was a framework versus just a XAP I could use in a web application. After some successful complaining :-) and an opportunity to get into a milestone build, the progressive download feature was added which enabled non-Smooth Streaming people to use it.

I’m wanting to standardize on what our teams are providing for best practices, so I’ve started using this player.

NOTE: Does SL Video Player still live? Yes, and it has VERY basic features. It is super small and simple, but may not be for everyone’s liking.

So I started to solve the other problem, primarily for my use, of having essentially a stand-alone player using this framework.

Extending the Silverlight Media Framework

You see, the SMF itself is essentially a set of controls…but not an ‘app’ itself that you can just consume the binary. What I did was basically create a new Silverlight application myself with one simple element: Player. This way I could implement what I needed for my use. The first thing I wanted was to have a simple XAP that I’d be able to load parameters in…very much like we did for SL Video Player on codeplex. To make essentially the player have a flexible use model. I could host the player anywhere and just feed it media to play.

I used the InitParams feature of the Silverlight plugin model to enable me to pass in parameters to the application. I wanted a simple parameter ‘media’ that basically was a URI to my media. For most of my needs this would be a progressive download situation. I added the simple feature using InitParams, and passed that URI to the MediaElement of the player framework. All was well.

Missing Features – Part 2

I then realized two features that I love about the Expression Encoder templates: AutoLoad and ThumbnailImage. These two features are pretty much essential for a bandwidth saving playback experience. AutoLoad basically disables the media from starting to be fetched until the user clicks play. The ThumbnailImage enables a static screenshot view to be displayed until a media frame could be captured. These two features work well together.

The AutoLoad (cueing) was critical for me. I didn’t want media to start downloading until the user said so. This saves me bandwidth as well as doesn’t annoy the user if there is a ton of media on one page (which might not be a good UX to begin with, but I digress).

I saw an event PlayControlClicked in the framework that I felt I could tap into. I figured I’d just wire up to that event and set the MediaElement.Source when the user clicked that. FAIL. The problem was that the play control in the current framework isn’t even enabled until the media source is set. This defeated my whole purpose.

After some spelunking in the source – did I mention that SMF is Open Source? – I found the culprit functions. Disabling them made everything work but it just didn’t feel right. Luckily one of the developers of the framework, Kevin from Vertigo, and I start chatting (virtually of course, after all nobody ‘talks’ anymore for real right?). I told him of my findings and hacks and he educated me that I didn’t even need to mess with the source, but could accomplish my needs by subclassing the Player. Kevin sent me some sample code for what he called a DeferredSource, which is what I wanted.

After some quick tests, I realized that I should keep all scenarios enabled:

Deferred loading (AutoLoad=false)
Normal progressive playback (AutoLoad=true)
Windows Streaming
IIS Smooth Streaming

I modified Kevin’s source a bit and got everything working. Now I have 3 parameters:

media – the URI of the stream, IIS Smooth Streaming manifest, or media file for progressive download
autoload – used really only for progressive download, would enable/disable cueing of the video upon load
ss – to specify if the URI indicated in ‘media’ is an IIS Smooth Streaming implementation

With this done I can now do something as simple as:

   1: <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="320" height="240">

   2:   <param name="source" value="/ClientBin/SmfSimplePlayer.xap"/>

   3:   <param name="background" value="white" />

   4:   <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="3.0.40818.0" />

   5:   <param name="initParams" value="media=URL_TO_YOUR_VIDEO" />

   6:   <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />

   7:   <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=3.0.40818.0" style="text-decoration:none">

   8:           <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/>

   9:   </a>

  10: </object>

Boom, done. Now I had a player based on SMF that served my needs.

Wishlist

I still didn’t implement the ThumbnailImage in my player. This is a wishlist item for me…it isn’t critical but nice for when AutoLoad=false so it isn’t just a blank screen! Additionally, the one thing I have to admit I’m not wild about is the overall size. The compiled XAP is 230K. In contrast my SL Video Player is 16K. Why the big size? Well, the SMF today is intended for someone who really wants to implement all the features it provides, including Smooth Streaming. If you aren’t using Smooth Streaming, then you still have those dependencies with you…not ideal.

In talking with the dev team and framework team, I know their plans for updated milestones of SMF and am pleased with the roadmap. They have taken a lot of feedback of how mainstream uses might be implemented and will make it continue to be awesome with a bit more flexibility of taking what you need!

Summary

If you need a solid, basic player take a look at SMF. There are other players out there of course, but this one is based on proven best practices in the toughest situations. And it is only getting better. There is a lot of room for improvement for the ‘YouTube’ style simplicity of playback for medium-low quality video playback for your personal sites showing home movies, etc. – and I know that scenario will improve, because I’m pushing for it as well.

If you want to use what I’ve done here, feel free – here are the files:

Compiled XAP
Source code for my modified stand-alone player – note that you will need the SMF and the dependencies for that before this will compile. This source contains only my modifications

There are also a bunch of videos for working with the Silverlight Media Framework beyond the basics. Be sure to check them out!

Hope this helps!

tags: silverlight, ria, xaml, smf, silverlight media framework, vertigo, slvideoplayer, codeplex, open source

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Quick FAQ on Visual Studio 2010 RC release (February 2010) and Silverlight development

Tim Heuer — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:37:07 GMT

Yesterday Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate was available for MSDN subscribers and would be generally available on 10 February 2010 for the public. This release represents a significant improvement in the overall Visual Studio product and a lot was based on beta tester feedback.

Of course, as a Silverlight developer you will be wondering: Can I still develop Silverlight 4 applications with the VS2010 RC?

Here’s the simplest form of a FAQ I could provide for you:

Q: What was released this week for Visual Studio 2010?
A: The Visual Studio team released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate builds.

Q: When can I download them?
A: If you are an MSDN subscriber, you can today (8 FEB). Generally availability will be 10 FEB.

Q: Can I developer Silverlight applications?
A: Yes, you can develop Silverlight 3 applications with the release candidate of Visual Studio 2010.

Q: What about Silverlight 4 applications?
Q: Is there an updated Silverlight 4 Tools installer?
Q: Is there an updated WCF RIA Services build for VS2010?
Q: Is there an updated Silverlight Toolkit build for VS2010/Silverlight 4?
Q: Is there an updated Blend for .NET 4 Preview build?
A: At this time, VS2010 RC does not support developing Silverlight 4 applications. This means that at this time there is no update for Silverlight 4 runtime/tools or the WCF RIA Services or other companion frameworks (toolkit controls, etc.). This will not be enabled until the next public build of Silverlight 4 and companion frameworks.

Q: If I want to develop Silverlight 4 applications, what should I do?
A: You should stick on the public Beta 2 build of Visual Studio for now with the companion tools/framework builds.

Q: You mentioned ‘next public build’ so when will that be for Silverlight 4?
A: We haven’t released a timeframe on that availability right now. :-(

Q: Can I run Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Visual Studio RC side-by-side?
A: No.

Q: Are there hacks to make Silverlight 4 tools work with the VS2010 RC?
A: I’m sure someone might cobble something together, but frankly there are issues between the two and the combination isn’t supported.

Q: What is wrong with you people? Why don’t you release things at the same time?!
A: If everyone could intern for a week in the developer division at Microsoft you’d see the challenges faced with various products innovating on different time schedules and resources and teams managing as best they can. Frankly, Visual Studio is on a path. Silverlight 4 as a not-yet-released-product has to wait for VS milestones to ensure SL tools work well with our builds. This same holds true for the companion frameworks and Blend. It is not a fun place to be as we are all moving targets for each other with varying dependencies. The Silverlight and RIA Services teams are working hard to finish a product. That is our goal. We want to make sure not to distract resources from adding support to interim builds that we simply can’t handle right now in order to deliver a quality FINAL product for you.

Hopefully this helps, even if it isn’t what you wanted to hear for Silverlight development at this time.

tags: silverlight, riaservices, xaml, visual studio, vs2010, wcf ria services, toolkit

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When Blobs attack – understanding cloud storage bursts and viewing logs

Tim Heuer — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:42:30 GMT

Here’s how it started…

Lisa (my wife) [shouting from office into the kitchen]: Tim, what’s this Amazon charge for $193?
Me [thinking what I may have purchased and not remembered]: Um, don’t know…let me look.

I then logged into my Amazon account to see what order I may have forgotten. Surely I didn’t order $200 worth of MP3…that’s ridiculous. Sure enough nothing was there. Immediately I’m thinking fraud. I start freaking out, getting mad, figuring out my revenge scheme on the scammer, etc.

Then it hit me: Amazon Web Services account.

The Culprit

Sure enough I logged in and my January 2010 billing account was $193 and change. Yikes. Well, I could let the (what has been averaging) $30 or so charge slide under the family CFO radar for a while…but this $193 charge…the chief auditor herself caught that one.

So I panicked. I needed to figure out where/what the spike was. I logged into the Amazon Web Services management console (I only use the S3/CloudFront storage in their services right no) to see what was going on. I see ‘Usage Reports’ and click. I’m met with essentially a bunch of useless data really. No offense to Amazon, but really the usage reports weren’t really helpful at all. First, they gave me a Resource ID which I thought would represent the URI I was looking for. Nope, Resource ID == Bucket. And they didn’t even put the bucket name in the report!

For some perspective, here’s essentially what I’m used to – here’s my December 2009 billing statement details:

Anyhow, after some hunting it was obvious that I wasn’t going to figure out what bucket objects/unique URIs were causing my spike. This was primarily because I didn’t have logging turned on at all on my buckets. I had in the past but really didn’t think I needed it so I turned it off.

I was wrong – go now and enable logging.

While I was searching for a solution to understand my traffic, I was curious for where my traffic was. Like I said, I’d been averaging (actually *peaking*) at about a $30 charge for the S3 hosting.

NOTE: I use S3 for all my image/screenshot/sample code file hosting. I’ve invested in S3 for a long time and built my blogging workflow around it with building tools like S3 Browser for Windows Live Writer.

What was interesting was my most usage of my CloudFront data was coming from Hong Kong. Compare to above the December 2009 billing to this January 2010 billing:

Yeah, that was my reaction too. I went from roughly 40GB of transfer bandwidth to over 960GB in one month. I suspected I knew what happened, but needed to confirm before I changed things.

Implementing Logging for Statistics

The problem was that I didn’t have logging enabled and I was pretty much stuck. I needed to get some data from the logs before being for sure. I quickly found S3Stat and it appears to be the de-facto reporting for Amazon S3 log files. I signed up for the free trial and generated a new access key to give them.

NOTE: They have a ‘manual’ option which means a lot more work. I simply generated a NEW S3 access key for this specific purpose. That way I didn’t have to give them my golden key I’ve been using in other places and can shut this off at any time without issue to my other workflows.

24 hours later, I had some reports. Wicked cool reports. Here’s a list of what I’m currently looking at:

Total hits, total files, total kbytes
Hits/files per hour/day
Hourly stats
Top 30 URIs
Top URIs by kbytes used
Top referrers (find out who’s using your bits without you knowing)
User agents

Here’s a quick snapshot of one:

Wow…honestly…THIS is what I was expecting when I see “usage” data reports. S3Stat is awesome and you should use that now. Yes, I’m buttering up to them…but they have a great tool here for $5/month if you are a heavy Amazon S3/CloudFront user. Amazon frankly should just buy them and integrate this into their management console. You can see other examples of their report outputs on their site at http://www.s3stat.com.

What I also found out is that the tool I use for my desktop usage of S3/CloudFront (outside of my blogger workfow and S3Browser) has S3Stat integration built in! I use CloudBerry’s S3 Explorer Pro for managing my S3 content. It’s awesome and you should look at it. When I look at the logging features in CloudBerry I see this:

And after enabling the logging, within CloudBerry I can view the log data within the tool:

Summary

Wow, this is incredibly helpful and insightful data. I now know who/how/when my cloud storage data is being used in various ways I can see the data. S3Stat immediately showed me incredible value within less than 24 hours of enabling it. I know can confirm the culprit of the burst of usage and plan accordingly.

Now, to be clear I’m not complaining about the cost of cloud storage. That has been clear to me from the beginning. Nothing is hidden and I’m not an idiot for not understanding it. What I did not account for was the popularity of some files…and then the ones that just happened to be the largest. I could not have personally thought I’d see a 920GB spike in one month of usage…but now I know…and have to alter some plans.

Hopefully this is helpful for some who are just exploring cloud storage solutions/services. Make sure you have instrumentation and logging capabilities turned on so you can identify and tune your situations. For me, S3Stat and CloudBerry are winners for my personal usages. If you are an Amazon S3 customer, I recommend looking at S3Stat and turning on logging immediately!

tags: amazon, s3, s3stat, cloudfront, cloud, cloud storage, azure

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