Daily Archives: May 21, 2007

Integrate YouTube videos in Silverlight? Fuggedaboudit

Just Rambling

While I had taken some baby steps with using the mediaElement in Silverlight (eg playing one of the wmv videos included in the sample videos in Vista) I had not investigated much further even though I was having fantasies of a sample Ink in Silverlight demo that would involve annotating your favorite YouTube videos.

I have started playing with drawing in Silverlight in this sample app. The cool thing is that while it works best on a TabletPC, it is not a requirement. You can even use it on a Mac.

However, I quickly learned that YouTube videos are formatted using a flash format (FLV). I had no idea that this existed. I really know so little about media encoding. I’m a database developer, not a designer.

Silverlight only displays WMV formats.

So my next idea was to point to Microsoft’s YouTube wannabe site , SOAPBOX, but was surprised to see that while they are tweaking the features, the site requires a login to access videos. So much for writing an app to help promote SOAPBOX.

Then I looked at Yahoo… more flash videos.

Then it was time for dinner. So I might have to do my first experiments with some canned videos. But I REALLY like my idea and want to find a way to make it happen.

 

DevTeach ADO.NET 3.5/Entity Framework PPT and Demos

Presentations

My Entity Framework presentation at DevTeach was in the last slot of the conference. It was scheduled in the theater which looks like something out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Some of the speakers were referring to it as the muppet theater.

About 5 minutes into my presentation, we were informed that there was a snafu with the hotel and they had scheduled a dress-up cocktail party in the theater. So we had to pick up and move to the ballroom on the other end of the conference center. No worries. Except that when we arrived, there was no projector or screen.

So, while the IT guys from DMIB (thank you thank you!!) set up a projector and screen for me, I just stood up and started talking about the Entity Framework for about 10 minutes until I had the use of my slides and demos again.

I wasn’t too phased by this since I could easily sit in a bar with geeks and talk about this stuff for hours with out the aid of a computer. Also I had a VERY great audience of attendees who were totally understanding! Thanks to you, also.

I have posted the demos and a revised Powerpoint for the ADO.NET Entity Framework presentation to the DevTeach site for attendees and to my own website at www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx for others. I have run these demos in the March CTP of Orcas.