Software Development in the Real World

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta

Scott Gu has an awesome write up on the upcoming Service Pack for Visual Studio and the .net Framework 3.5.  Make sure you check it out here.

With Service Pack 1, Visual Studio 2008 introduces a large assortment of new features for targeting Windows, Office, and the Web. Developers building .NET-basedapplications will enjoy improved performance in the WPF designer, new components for Visual Basic and Visual C++, as well as an MFC-based Office 2007 Ribbon. Web developers will see continued improvement in the client-side script tooling including JavaScript IntelliSense. Additionally, full support for SQL Server 2008, the ADO.NET Entity Framework and performance improvements for the IDE make Service Pack 1 a great release across the board.

The .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 delivers more controls, a streamlined setup, improved start-up performance, and powerful new graphics features for client development and rich data scaffolding, improved AJAX support, and other improvements for Web development. Additionally it introduces the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which simplify data access code in applications by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any data source and enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements.

Download Visual Studio 2008 and .net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta

Microsoft and RIM Bring Windows Live to BlackBerry

One annoying thing about using a BlackBerry has always been the fact that some of the Live Services that work so well on Windows Mobile Devices don't work at all on the BlackBerry.  Sounds like Microsoft and RIM will be solving the issue shortly!

For enterprise users, this won't mean much, but for consumers that go out and buy BlackBerry's and don't have a BES Server, this means you can sign up to Microsoft as your email provider, and have the email "pushed" to your device.  Google has GMail for Blackberry, but it is not push technology.

The integration of Windows Live services into the BlackBerry platform will allow customers who use Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger on their BlackBerry smartphone to benefit from the BlackBerry platform architecture with the ability to communicate in real time using push technology, and an exceptional mobile communications experience. Customers will also be able to seamlessly access their Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger account from their BlackBerry smartphone by simply entering their Windows Live e-mail address and password once.

“The BlackBerry platform is respected around the world for providing optimized messaging capabilities, and RIM continues to look for ways to provide customers with a wide range of communications options and the best possible mobile experience,” said Mark Guibert, vice president, Corporate Marketing at RIM. “Our relationship with Microsoft and the addition of Windows Live services to BlackBerry smartphones help us build on that strategy for our customers.”

These partnerships are great as they pave the way for things like Silverlight on BlackBerry's, and other cool ideas.

Read the Press Release from Microsoft here.

How To Convert Movies to Flash or Silverlight with c#

Looking for a fun software development project? Want to build your own YouTube? Ya me either, but how the heck do you convert videos to flash or Silverlight? It's not that hard actually as long as you use FFmpeg and some c# code. FFmpeg is a free video and audio converter.  What I like about Silverlight is it will just take the WMV format, and stream it for you.  So if your video is already in WMV, your are done.  If not, you can convert i to WMV, including the HD formats.  In flash, you will have to write some extra code to get it converted.  Check out the HD Halo Trailer in Silverlight by the way.

The first thing you will want to do is download FFmpeg.  There will be a few different files in there.  Make sure you put FFMPEG.exe and FLVTOOL.exe in your application directory.  Next you will want set the correct permissions on your web server.

The code below is fairly basic, but using other FFmpeg commands you can easily create thumbnails from the video, and save them to a location on your web server.  This code for example would create some image thumbnails for you quit easily.

startInfo.Arguments = string.Format(“-i \”{0}\” -f image2 -ss 1 -vframes 1
-s 80x60 -an \ \”{1}\”", srcURL, destURL);

If you are using Silverlight, you can just keep the file in wmv, or convert it to wmv, and just run the command above against the video file to capture the image screenshot.

Anyway here is the sample code for you to try out to convert the video file to flash.  Silverlight is cool because you don't have to do that and it can just play the wmv in a streaming format automagically.

Sample Code

private void ConvertVideo(string srcURL, string destURL)
{
    string ffmpegURL = “~/project/tools/ffmpeg.exe”;
    DirectoryInfo directoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(Path.GetDirectoryName
      (Server.MapPath(ffmpegURL)));
    ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo();
    startInfo.FileName = Server.MapPath(ffmpegURL);
    startInfo.Arguments = string.Format(“-i \”{0}\” -acodec mp3 -ab 64k -ac 2 
      -ar 44100 -f flv -deinterlace -nr 500 -croptop 4 -cropbottom 8 -cropleft 8 
      -cropright 8 -s 640x480 -aspect 4:3 -r 25 -b 650k -me_range 25 -i_qfactor 0.71 
      -g 500 \”{1}\”", srcURL, destURL);
    startInfo.WorkingDirectory = directoryInfo.FullName;
    startInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
    startInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
    startInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true;
    startInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;

    using (Process process = new Process())

    {

        process.StartInfo = startInfo;

        try

        {

            process.Start();

            StreamReader standardOutput = process.StandardOutput;

            StreamWriter standardInput = process.StandardInput;

            StreamReader standardError = process.StandardError;

            process.WaitForExit();

            lblError.Text = standardError.ReadToEnd();

            lblOutput.Text = standardOutput.ReadToEnd();

        }

        catch (Exception ex)

        {

            Response.Write(ex.ToString());

        }

    }

}