in case you have been caught-up with all the pdc announcements and missed this one, we have announced plans with akamai to enable high-definition (HD) quality experiences over the web using smooth streaming.

so what the heck is smooth streaming? smooth streaming, a new extension for internet information services (iis) 7.0, enables adaptive streaming of media to silverlight clients via http. the sweet thing is smooth streaming dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file that a silverlight player receives based on local bandwidth and cpu conditions. consumers with high bandwidth connections can experience hd quality streaming while others with lower bandwidth speeds receive the appropriate stream for their connectivity, allowing consumers across the board to enjoy a consistent high quality streaming experience.

akamai also announced a proof of concept portal demonstrating the technology available at www.smoothhd.com. additionally, microsoft is announcing the upcoming availability of expression encoder 2 sp1 which encodes smooth streaming files.

pay attention to how this will change the game in media streaming!

the “overnight success” video at the software + services site just makes me feel all good inside. i remember the days of launching “big deal” sites and worrying if they would hold up. how i would love to just simply be able to spin a dial and provision some more cloud love in the middle of a game of gears.

this video is my new best friend.

in case you were not paying attention, during the opening keynote at pdc ray ozzie announced our cloud services platform, azure services platform (formerly codenamed “strata”). i am super excited about this since i have been making the speaking tour on the windows live platform. azure takes this to a new level with a comprehensive development service, consistent programming model on-premises and in the cloud, a familiar development environment, and control and customizability. azure does all this and does this well.

windows azure is a component of the azure services platform that extends the windows environment to the cloud for developers who want service hosting, scalable storage, and automated service management of their software applications.

pay attention to more announcements from pdc to see where we are taking azure now and into the future.

while i am sure you have caught the silverlight news at teched, today soma somasegar and bill gates announced that silverlight 2 beta 2 will be publicly available later this week. there is no specific time, so keep your eyes on the silverlight site.

here are some of the exciting features:

• UI Framework: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance.  This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.
   
• Rich Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more.  Most controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.
   
• Networking Support: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).
   
• Rich Base Class Library: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.
   
• Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better, event driven notification for zoom/pan state is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.
   

as promised, i wanted to follow-up on my post on developing the new briangorbett.com site with what was even more challenging... the design.

first, i believe in simplistic, clean designs and i wanted to echo this with the site launch. once i had my paper-prototype done, i figured it would be a fairly straight forward exercise. boy, was i wrong.

it turned out that the challenges i faced had to do more with the various different characteristics of the browsers and how they varied in rendering design. what is so challenging is the way the different browsers handled styles. one that challenged me was ie's inability to use css inheritance (except for the direction and visibility properties).

the challenge was the way i wanted the last 5 feeds posted to fade in and out below my flickr slideshow. in order to achieve the fade effect and be a link, the link property has to inherit the color of the text property so that when the javascript fades the text, the link fades too. well in ie, that is not going to happen. so what i ended having to do is detect if the browser is ie (except 8) and use a standard onclick event on the entire div that redirects to the post. you can see this by browsing to the main page with firefox and hovering over the text. this is using a standard link whereas in ie, you can hover over the entire div box and not just the text.

another little trick i am using (although probably not recommended) is using the deprecated "hand" value for the cursor property in the div. the nice thing about this is that firefox and safari does not recognize this so still uses the default arrow cursor. however, ie changes the cursor to the hand (the correct cross-browser value to change the cursor to the pointer hand).

another handy trick is to use a conditional in your html to assign a custom stylesheet for a specific browser (if only this was not necessary). for instance, i am using this in the head:

    <![if !IE]>
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="NotIE.css" />
    <![endif]>

this is going to load up the styles included in the stylesheet "NotIE.css" only if the browser is, you guessed it, not ie! this is important when trying to do things like simply centering a div. there are plenty of resources on the web for finding how to this in a cross-browser way, so i won't waste your time. the point is to use proper techniques to get your design the way you want it to look on all browsers, not just the one you may use all the time (i test on ie (now using 8 since i can switch modes to make it act like 8, 7, 5, etc.), safari, and firefox).

i guess we all have many different organizations to thank for the incompatibilities within the browsers (particularly the ambiguity in the standards), but it is our duty as web developers and designers to make the user experience as comfortable for users of all browsers. it will be interesting when ie 8 drops in all of it's full standards mode. we will see how many web developers had truly tested their sites.

i will be presenting all that is super cool about silverlight at the web development sig in solon, ohio this saturday. we will be discussing how developers and designers can start to take advantage of what is available in silverlight today and into the future.

the talk will include both discussion, demo, and code.

i have long prided myself on being a devigner (typically i would link back to a wikipedia article, but one does not exist... anyone interested in contributing?). this is a term that is starting to come back, but has been used for a long time by others that roll as a developer and designer. my fellow msft friend, adam kinney, talks about it here as well (although the designer force is much stronger with him).

anyway, as i was working on my site, briangorbett.com (yah... no link. you are already here. click the house icon in the upper right), i learned how asp.net 3.5 has made my development much easier and the growing complexities of site design has made my life a living hell.

let me start with the development. actually, there is not much to talk about here. with asp.net 3.5, i have never plumbed a site so fast. my homepage is rotating out the last 5 blog posts i made. in the past, grabbing the rss feed and manipulating the stream was fairly tedious. with asp.net 3.5, i did it in two lines. no, i am not kidding.

Dim xmlReader = System.Xml.XmlReader.Create(feedUrl)
Dim feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(xmlReader)

oh yah... i roll with vb baby!

there you have it. just replace feedUrl with your blog feed and you got it. one thing to note is that you will first have to add the reference to System.ServiceModel.Web (don't bother looking for System.ServiceModel.Syndication you silverlight fans... you won't find it unless you dig into the silverlight namespaces which won't work here). then do an imports (or "using" you c# fanboys) on System.ServiceModel.Syndication. here are my other "imports":

Imports System.ServiceModel.Syndication
Imports System.Net
Imports System.Xml

once you got that all wired up, have fun with feed items! in this case, i am adding posts to an arraylist:

For Each item As SyndicationItem In feed.Items
      feedList.Add("<a href='" + item.Links(0).Uri.AbsoluteUri + "'>" + newTitle + "</a>")
Next

there is actually a wee bit more code in my implementation because of browser differences in rendering (more on that in my next post).

slide.show silverlight slideshow
after that all the silverlight love goes to vertigo (you know... the guys that launched that crazy cool deep zoom site for hard rock at mix) for their slide.show silverlight application that is really easy to wire up to a flickr feed. i am pointing at a feed that will grow as me and my fellow msft evangelists post shots of events and general craziness. there are quite of few tweeks you can make to the app to suit your needs and are easy to change via an xml file. if only the formatting of the site was as easy as using this control.

my next rant... um... i mean post will discuss the challenges standard compliant design and browser compatibility gave me. i am still too flustered with losing a good full night of my life trying to somehow convince ie <8 ("ie less than 8" is my new term for all versions of internet explorer before version 8) that the css attribute inherit is really valid for other properties besides direction and visibility). i am starting to get mad just thinking about it... i have to take a breather before my next post.