DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by BronwenZ

Your video to Silverlight Streaming 103 - With Expression Encoder Plug

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:35:18 GMT

This article is a update to Your video to Silverlight Streaming 102. It gives a simple introduction to Silverlight Streaming that will allow you to turn your own video content into a Silverlight Streaming application ready for you to place on your website or blog using Silverlight Streaming plug-in for Expression Encoder to publish to your Silverlight Streaming account.

Silverlight Virtual Earth, Part 3 Project "Deep Earth" launches

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 07:52:08 GMT

Today we launched project "Deep Earth" on codeplex. This open source project will bring together skills from developers all over the world to continue this concept and ultimately create a useable Silverlight control. Seven people have joined the fun: Shaun Becker, Jonas Follesø, Bronwen Zande, Darko Radiceski, Nicolas Boonaert, Rob Farley and myself John O'Brien. What a great mix of people!

Silverlight Virtual Earth, Part 2 MultiScaleTileSource

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:59:36 GMT

The feedback from Part 1 has been great! There is definitely interest in this. Shaun Becker sent through this gem that removes my proxy server completely! Yes we now have Silverlight Deep Zoom talking directly to Virtual Earth! And better still I can give you a live demo (need SL beta2 installed - click image to view):

Silverlight Virtual Earth, Part 1 using Deep Zoom - Sample

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:58:15 GMT

Silverlight and Virtual Earth are made for each other, but how best do we go about creating a Virtual Earth control in Silverlight? First up lets look at utilising the existing Deep Zoom control to serve up the base image tiles. In this proof of concept we have little more then a stock MultiScaleImage control hooked up to some appropriately created configuration XML, the output is only 6.8KB for the client! And check out the results on video:

Silverlight Streaming Media Player - video restart on postback

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:24:57 GMT

Have had "fun" with the SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayerl today..haven't found the solution..just all the symptoms. So i've got a SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer, I've set it to point to an application on Silverlight Streaming, with autoplay OFF so it doesn't start playing as soon as you load the page...all works well. Then I added a GridView which displayed thumbnails of all the videos I want to play, and when the user clicks on one i update the video and play it using the following javascript:

Silverlight Deep Zoom Sample Code Part 2

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:23:44 GMT

The Expression team have posted about how to manipulate collections within the Silverlight 2 multiscaleimage control. So what a great time to revisit my little sample code and make some improvements. Let make sure we have mouse, mouse wheel, keyboard, bounds checks and resorting. See my updated sample here. Use the "R" key to resort the collection

Silverlight Deep Zoom Sample Code

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:09:34 GMT

After seeing the amazing demo at Mix08 this week I decided I needed to play with this. Checkout my collection of photos from our trip to Thailand last year: http://thailand.soulclients.com

DownloaError error#1001 in control 'SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer1'

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:07:32 GMT

I wanted to play with the Silverlight Streaming Server control that's part of the Live Tools for Visual Studio. When i went to run my application I got the following error: Sys.InvalidOperationExceptoin: DownloaError error#1001 in control 'SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer1': AG_E_UNKNOWN_ERROR I tried both the Dec CTP and the Feb CTP with the same error. Turns out you can't use a videos that were uploaded using the new "Manage Video" option, only applications. So I've switched back to using videos uploaded as applications and it works a treat :)

Visual Studio Tools for Windows Live - February CTP available

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:06:13 GMT

If you've been using the Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio, the February 2008 CTP has been released. See the notes here: https://connect.microsoft.com/content/content.aspx?ContentID=7901&SiteID=505&wa=wsignin1.0 So what's different? Messenger Chat Control has been added Depenency on ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions has been REMOVED. CTP is compatible with Silverlight 2.0 SDK The site is context sensitive so click on Downloads to get the list of builds available for download or go here: https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/Downloads.aspx?SiteID=505

Order by with LINQ to XML

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 06:54:58 GMT

Was playing with Linq to XML today and wanted to do an orderby based on one of the fields in the xml file. It's a bit different to SQL as the orderby goes between the from and the select. My code below shows selecting everything and ordering by the eventdate descending.

Using ADO.Net and Com Interop to read, modify and output from Excel

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:27:35 GMT

Today I was asked to do what seemed like a fairly simple task: Take an Excel 2003 file, add a couple of columns of data and save to a new Excel file programattically. I haven't done any coding Excel for AGES so this i what I did. To read in the file and add the extra columm and data I did the following: Used OleDBConnection to grab the data from the sheet into a dataset Added some columns to the dataset did some processing and set the data in the dataset with the following code:

Visual Studio 2008 - Document Outline + Split View

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 07:38:11 GMT

Have been using Visual Studio 2008 for awhile now so I thought I'd share some great features. 1. Split View - gives us the ability to see both Design/XAML or Design/HTML view on the same screen with real time update ..very cool 2. Document Outline - to turn this guy on goto View -> Other Windows -> Document Outline. This gives you a tree of all the objects on your page. You can use it to navigate to a specific item and it gives you a visual queue of what it looks like + with split view selects the item in desgn and code view. Using both of these features together is really useful to get to "hard to find elements". I've attached a screen shot to show both these features in action at once. Here I've selected a button in the Document Outline..it shows a popup of the button, selects it in the design view aswell as the xaml view.

Ask me about my articles..with Web IM/Presence control

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:54:24 GMT

After playing with the Web IM Control and Presence API yesterday, I thought to myself..hey..it'd be cool for ppl to ask me questions about my articles. So i've put my presence next to my name on my articles

Article: Messenger IM Control & Presence

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:06:26 GMT

For those interested in the new IM Control and Presence API there is a new article on ViaWindowsLive Messenger IM Control & Presence API Introduction - This article gives a brief introduction to the Windows Live Messenger IM Control & Presence API. It provides a walkthrough of how to setup, install and use the control from both an owner and a vistor user perspective. Anyone wanting to contribute articles to the site should goto the Contribute Page

Web IM / Presence has been released..it's prett cool.

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:06:51 GMT

Many of you may have alread seen Angus's blog and the introduction of a web IM/Presence control on the left side. For those who haven't...check it out :) So for anyone who uses Messenger and has thought to themself.."gee, it'd be really handy to be able to have a messenger control on my site so people can talk to me without having Messenger", your wishes have been granted. I'll be doing an article about setting this up in the next couple of days..so watch this space... If you want to have a play yourself here's the cutdown version of what to do:

Can't find ObservableCollection ... look in WindowsBase

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 02:45:43 GMT

I wanted to use ObservableCollection for databinding in WPF cause it handles all the nofications of list changes and generally is just cool. The problem i had was I had my objects in a different project..a dll and I couldn't access the ObservableCollection object. It worked if I was in a WPF project though. My problem was essentially that I didn't read the object definition in MSDN very well cause it clearly states it's in the WindowsBase directory! So if you're having this problem..you can't find ObservableCollectioin...just include WindowsBase.dll in the project references.

New Virtual Earth Article on ViaWindowsLive

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:40:04 GMT

Darren Neimke has just submitted a new artilce to ViaWindowsLive. Adding Verbs to the Virtual Earth InfoBox - Virtual Earth supplies us with an API for working with locations offering features ranging from zooming through to locational push pins that can be added to the mapping interface to mark the location of user-added places. The Virtual Earth map also offers rich tooltips in the form of an InfoBox which is used to display information about pins when a user hovers their over them. However, out of the box there is no API for the InfoBox to control over the behavior Anyone wanting to contribute articles to the site should goto the Contribute Page

New Article - Your video to Silverlight Streaming 102

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:20:18 GMT

I've created a new article: Your video to Silverlight Streaming 102 - With Expression Encoder Plugin. It is a follow up from Your video to Silverlight Streaming 101. It gives a simple introduction to Silverlight Streaming that will allow you to turn your own video content into a Silverlight Streaming application ready for you to place on your website or blog using Silverlight Streaming plug-in for Expression Encoder to publish to your Silverlight Streaming account

Clustering Virtual Earth 6. Performance, throttling and PNG icons

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:23:31 GMT

This weekend I upgraded the code in the clustering example to Version 6 of Virtual Earth. This means we now utilise the bulk add shapes method and the bounds for a birdseye scene. Additionally I added some throttling logic for ajax webservices and showed how to provide legacy support for PNG icons in IE6. Read the article here: http://www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/VirtualEarth/ClusteringPinsinVirtualEarth6.aspx

Linking your LiveIDs

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:19:47 GMT

You ever get sick of having mulitple liveids and different passwods and trying to remember which one is which (is is it just me) ? A great new feature has been release that means you can link your liveids, login with just one password and switch between your ids using a combo box..pretty cool hey.

Writing Your First Live Alert Messages

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:05:59 GMT

For anyone interested in articles on Live Alerts, I've posted a new artcle: Writing Your First Alert Messages This article discusses the basics of the using the Alerts SDK and provides some simple helper methods help you write your first alert messages There are two different types of Live Alerts: 1. Alerts based on RSS feeds. Everything you need to know about this type of alert can be found at http://signup.alerts.live.com/brochure/index.jsp 2. Alerts based on an SDK. This article concentrates on the Alerts SDK.

Virtual Earth 6 Articles and Videos

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:33:02 GMT

I've been busy with the release of Virtual Earth 6 this week exploring the new features and making some videos and articles. A must read for any VE developer is the what's new Article I just finished: http://www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/VirtualEarth/WhatsnewinVersion6.aspx I'm very impressed by this release with no breaking changes and many good new features. The VWL site also has the new getting started article from MSDN if you feel like building your first map: http://www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/VirtualEarth/GettingStartedwithVersion6.aspx I have also been having fun with the new features on maps.live.com and made two videos (available in 720p High Definition) on the new 3D models that you can make and import into Virtual Earth 3D and also the new 3D tours. http://www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/VirtualEarth/Creatingyourfirst3Dmodel.aspx http://www.viawindowslive.com/Articles/VirtualEarth/Createa3Dtour.aspx The viawindowslive site is all about community content and resources so if you have something to contribute feel free to get involved: http://www.viawindowslive.com/Contribute.aspx

New Live Search Article on ViaWindowsLive

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 23:16:49 GMT

For anyone interested in articles on Live Search, Daniel Wissa has contributed a new article on ViaWindowsLive. Adding Live Search Functionality To Your Website This article explains the different ways you can use to integrate Windows Live Search functionality to your website. There are 3 different ways by which this can be done: Using the Basic Live Search Box, using the Advanced Live Search Box and using the MSN Search Web service. Anyone wanting to contribute to the community site should goto the Contribute page and signup.

Binding to Object properties in WPF

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:32:12 GMT

How to bind object properties to a listview in WPF

Windows Live Developer Community launched

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 23:19:11 GMT

Windows Live Developer Community launched