One of my colleagues (and former Flash developer) Nishant Kothary has written a great article for MIX Online focused on the process that he and his team went through while re-designing MIX Online. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the process of designing and developing a professional website. Great discussion of user experience, information architecture, and the importance of understanding content before focusing on design.
I forgot to post about this earlier. I wanted to mention that I was a guest on the second episode of Silverlight TV where I talked a bit about my background working on Flash at Adobe and how I thought Silverlight and .NET compared.
Check it out here.
Microsoft announced it’s new mobile operating system at Mobile World Congress today. I’ve been anticipating this announcement since I first heard about the WP7 plans internally. Now that we’ve shown off the user experience for the new OS the next question is: how do we build apps for it? Well, that part of the story will be told at Microsoft MIX ‘10 in mid-March. It is an awesome developer story and I can’t wait to be able to talk about it publicly!
In the mean time, here are some helpful links for learning more about today’s announcements (via The Official Microsoft Blog):
Also…
Sign up for MIX here if you want to learn more about developing for Windows Phone 7 Series – as well as all of the other topics at MIX, like Silverlight 4, of course!
If you’re developing Silverlight applications that play video and want to leverage advanced capabilities like IIS Smooth Streaming, DVR controls, logging, etc – you’ll want to take a look at the new Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) on CodePlex. Figuring it makes more sense to start with code that’s already deployed in a high-end, high-traffic application and work back from there, my team worked with Vertigo to take the player source code from the Sunday Night Football and Vancouver Olympics applications and turn it into a flexible media framework that any developer can leverage in their own Silverlight application. The source is currently available under a limited license but our goal is to make it fully open source under Ms-PL once our legal team has completed their code reviews.
From the site:
Microsoft’s Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) enables developers to quickly deploy a robust, scalable, customizable media player for IIS Smooth Streaming delivery. The SMF builds on the core functionality of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit.
SMF is built on a proven code base with dozens of leading Smooth Streaming deployments, including Wimbledon, Sunday Night Football on NBCSports, the UEFA Super Cup on Canal+, Roland Garros and the Tour de France on France Télévisions and many others and by providing developers with source code they can more easily build these experiences for their deployments. Key features in the framework include DVR, rewind, alternate language tracks, in-stream data feeds and analytics tracking. The SMF is designed for future third-party extensibility and component modularity, as well as support for other media delivery scenarios beyond Smooth Streaming.
This is just the first release of a framework that we intend to grow and evolve over time. It currently only officially supports live and on-demand Smooth Streaming implementations but we intend to release updates that will support progressive download and streaming as well.
Here are a few examples of the things that we intend to build into the framework in the future:
Please check it out and let me know if you have any questions or feedback. The best place to do this is on the CodePlex site in the Discussions section. The whole team is monitoring this daily.
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