Inside Silverlight 2 Beta 2 (Channel 9)

Inside Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Posted: Jun 10, 2008 at 11:12 AM

By: Charles

38,284 Views

3 Comments

Video format

Option selected may change based on video formats available and browser capability.

Auto

Use our suggested format for this video.

Smooth Streaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming - little buffering but lower video quality at times of low bandwidth. Silverlight 5 required

Progressive

Traditional buffered video format. Silverlight 5 required

HTML5

For browsers that support H.264 MP4 or WebM video playback such as:
IE9+, Firefox 4+, Chrome 5+, or Safari 4+.

Flash

For browsers that have the Adobe Flash Player plugin installed.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been released. We wanted to meet some of the developers of this SL incarnation to learn firsthand about what's in the bits. One of the truly cool new features in this release is Adaptive Streaming, which adds a programmable abstraction on top of media bit rates giving developers fine-grained control over Silverlight media streaming characteristics. What does this mean, exactly? Tune in.

Silverlight Development Lead Mark Alcazar, Silverlight Principal Group Program Manager Joe Stegman and Silverlight Senior Program Manager Lead Vivek Dalvi have all the answers.

This is a highly informative, casual and fun conversation with some of the development leaders behind Silverlight, which has evolved nicely in this most recent incarnation.

Enjoy.

Follow the Discussion

Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Subscribe to this comments

It is hard to understand the level of animosity that some Microsoft developers seem to have towads XAML. At least in WPF, if you want to, you can write out all the object initialization in source code. But, it is hard to imagine why anyone would think that approach is better than specifying the UI object tree in XAML. If people have trouble with the XAML, it is probably because they insist on sticking with yesterday's tools. Conceptually the XAML is fairly trivial. It is just a compact syntax for specifiying a tree of objects and values for properties and event handlers. The excellent intellisense support for XAML in Visual Studio makes handling most of the syntax easy to deal with. Of course there are some issues in understanding binding extentions and how resource references work. But those issues really have more to do with a funtional understanding the structure of the UI tree than they do with any particular method of specifying it. I don't doubt that high quality UI design tools are a better user interface than raw XAML. But functional UI's built around a tree of objects, master detail, or a data grid can easily be designed directly in XAML.

Of course, many developers have difficulty accepting the increasing emphasis on XML as a replacement for binary formats. Those deveopers have not caught up with the implications of the success of the internet and the stream of technology that has come from the IETF, the W3C, and companies like Microsoft and IBM.

Follow
Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Sign In to be begin to follow these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in. You need to be signed in to Channel 9 to use this feature.

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in and view them all on your notifications page.

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Did you know you can
sign up for email notifications?
- Subscribe to this comments

CKurt while( ( !succeed=try() ) ) { }

Jun 10, 2008 at 3:13 PM

FF3 support is indeed not perfect.

I'm really missing 'Silverlight Configuration' and 'Fullscreen view'

But overall, great product and great video !
Keep up the good work !
dnjake

Jun 11, 2008 at 8:29 AM

It is hard to understand the level of animosity that some Microsoft developers seem to have towads XAML. At least in WPF, if you want to, you can write out all the object initialization in source code. But, it is hard to imagine why anyone would think that approach is better than specifying the UI object tree in XAML. If people have trouble with the XAML, it is probably because they insist on sticking with yesterday's tools. Conceptually the XAML is fairly trivial. It is just a compact syntax for specifiying a tree of objects and values for properties and event handlers. The excellent intellisense support for XAML in Visual Studio makes handling most of the syntax easy to deal with. Of course there are some issues in understanding binding extentions and how resource references work. But those issues really have more to do with a funtional understanding the structure of the UI tree than they do with any particular method of specifying it. I don't doubt that high quality UI design tools are a better user interface than raw XAML. But functional UI's built around a tree of objects, master detail, or a data grid can easily be designed directly in XAML.

Of course, many developers have difficulty accepting the increasing emphasis on XML as a replacement for binary formats. Those deveopers have not caught up with the implications of the success of the internet and the stream of technology that has come from the IETF, the W3C, and companies like Microsoft and IBM.
Ben Hayat

Jun 11, 2008 at 12:22 PM

Charles, why are you standing up while interviewing these guys? Why aren't you sitting down/

I love the passion in the SL team!

..Ben

Remove this comment

Remove this thread

Comments Closed

Comments have been closed since this content was published more than 30 days ago, but if you'd like to continue the conversation, please create a new thread in our Forums,
or Contact Us and let us know.