figuerres said:

Harlequin said:

*snip*

what do you think of my idea of having Scott Guthrie be the "face man" ??

He also seems to have the red shirt thing going which is kind of analagous to the black turtleneck of Jobs...

Charles said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

Not yet... You will. In the near future.

C

Charles,

I understand that there was one video done as smooth streamed silverlight.  The rest of the videos on the site are still not smooth streamed including the new ones. I would have though that you guys would have started encoding all videos going forward with smooth streaming and then go back sloly but surely and re-encode all older videos. What is the plan for this going forward on the site?

You guys have always been open with us so feel free to be open about these plans. This feature doesnt have to be developed like Win 7 underpromise/overdeliver.  I think most people on this site would rather be a part of the conversation.

Regards,

Justin

Charles said:

ZippyV said:

*snip*

Not yet... You will. In the near future.

C

How will we be able to tell?  The live channel 9 episode says it is the first smooth streaming episode... is that when it was broadcast live, or the streaming version?  It would be cool if there is a bitrate that comes up with the controls when smooth streaming is working...

Duncanma said:

Joiseystud said:

*snip*

Yes and no. Our host, where our database is, is now cleared to hold this type of info (actually they always were, but it seems it just wasn't up to date in the system). Now we have to build the actual notification in.

I notice that this exact thing is being done on Zune.net.  Not sure if that helps you, but I didnt have to put anything special in.  Just my liveID and done...

Duncanma said:

yes, we are busy working on that right now actually

I'll post some test videos soon

Can't wait to see it.  Any idea on an ETA? 

Duncanma said:

That is my #1 desired feature as well, so it is definitely being planned. Lots of suggestions have come up around notification methods, but I'm thinking that email is the right way to go for this... any thoughts?

 

any progress on this feature request Duncan?

Duncanma said:

That is my #1 desired feature as well, so it is definitely being planned. Lots of suggestions have come up around notification methods, but I'm thinking that email is the right way to go for this... any thoughts?

 

I have only really seen it done through email.  I would do email as a minimum.   I prefer the sites that not only tell you there is a message, but also give you the post in the body of the email. 

Anyway, as you can see I am interested in the Soapbox story. I was uploading some home movies the other day and trying to choose whether to do it on Youtube or Soapbox... I liked the fact that Soapbox doesnt limit the time of the movie, but the 100meg limit makes for poor quality videos if more than a few min long.  I think the upload size limit should be huge (1GB like Youtube and Facebook) and Soapbox can downsample to the best quality it supports then delete the original... I guess they want to save bandwidth?  Well while people flock to youtube MSN is saving a lot of bandwidth alright...

What do you guys think about Soapbox?  What can be done to improve it?

Joiseystud said:

sysrpl said:

*snip*

I agree that stability was an issue and it felt mostly driver issues.  I bought a brand new Dell in March 08 with Nvidia 8800GT graphics and although drivers were available, it took 6 months of driver updates before there was one available that did not randomly drop the system into low res mode requiring manually resizing the desktop.  This was very annoyning and painted a very poor picture while I used my XP laptop with no issues. 

Mind you that I bought my machine over a year after Vista general availibility and still had massive issues. Imagine the experience of people who bought in Jan 2007.  Although today Vista is actually very good, after years of pain there was just no way to rescue the Vista image. The only way was to rename the system and cut the cord to the past...  Windows 7 is very much Windows VIsta, but it is Vista 2009, not Vista 2007-2008. 

I have IT pros at my company that wouldnt touch Vista with a 10 foot pole but are excited about Windows 7.  I think that is good news for MS.  Let the upgrade cycles begin...

Another thing... the price was too high. 

I hope this time around MS is agressive with pricing and lenient with Licenses.  I would like to see a family upgrade plan that covers 3 machines. Apple does this and it is great.  I would upgrade every machine in my house if this was done, otherwise it will be likely that I will be living with Vista until I replace my machines.  This could take a long time because my machines are all pretty modern.  I dont see the need to replace my Dell Laptop with 4GB of ram and 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo any time soon.  Really, if MS has any chance of upgrade sales, they will need to be aggressive on upgrade pricing to get users away from Vista. 

PerfectPhase said:

CKurt said:

*snip*

Really, is it so difficult to alow me to view this in a stand alone player!

That is a horrid site to use.

There is a download link which will let you see this outside of the browser. The video is still really bad though.

CKurt said:

http://www.msteched.com/online/channels.aspx?cname=track&channel=Keynote

Here

(if it works, does not seem to work here)

There is something wrong with this video.  It is skipping, audio is dropping out, etc.  Even if I use the download version there are issues.  Hopefully MS can re-encode the video and the master is not that way...

sysrpl said:

To answer the OP's question, when Vista first came out...

Network file copy ws completely broken. It would take forever to copy large files with every system I tried.

My USB peripherals and my Sound Blaster Live PCI card plain did not work. One computer I have with a nForce chipset, a 2Ghz CPU, and 1GB of RAM refused to run Vista.

UAC was overly annoying. Some important (to me) software programs didn't work when it was on. Some important (to me) software features didn't work at all. (QuickBooks QBXML interop for example).

Little things annoyed the hell out of me. I don't like the breadcrumb metaphor extended into explorer the way that it was. I did not lke the breadcrub path bar. I liked to see and edit the full pah always. I liked being able to press backspace to go "up" a folder and was annoyed that backspace now went up. I was annoyed that you can no longer easily change file type icons. The control panel was a mess in my opinion, you know ... moving away from applets with dialogs that had property sheets towards a "web like" explorer view. Not good IMO.

The Windows theme API introduced in XP was depricated for no good reason.

In general, Vista ran slower and hardware drivers were unstable. I believe Microsoft is partly at fault for this for changing the driver model quickly a few times leading up to the release of Vista, pulling the rug out from under hardware vendors causing them to lose confidence and dollars chasing Microsoft's changing dates.

There was also the whole Vista Capable Intel IGP fiasco.

Most importantly, Vista offered people little to no benefits over XP. In most cases it was beneficial to stick with XP, as you could be reasonably sure all hardware and software would work with it, whereas with Vista it was questionable.

I could go on, but  think you get the idea. I had complaints and XP was good enough. It took six years for Microsof to develop a new consumer OS (XP to Vista) that I (and I'm sure a lot of other people) didn't care for. Six years is a log time to wait for a disappointment, and being a developer, I was quite upset with Microsoft for stymying progress (again, as I saw it).

Cheers

I agree that stability was an issue and it felt mostly driver issues.  I bought a brand new Dell in March 08 with Nvidia 8800GT graphics and although drivers were available, it took 6 months of driver updates before there was one available that did not randomly drop the system into low res mode requiring manually resizing the desktop.  This was very annoyning and painted a very poor picture while I used my XP laptop with no issues. 

Mind you that I bought my machine over a year after Vista general availibility and still had massive issues. Imagine the experience of people who bought in Jan 2007.  Although today Vista is actually very good, after years of pain there was just no way to rescue the Vista image. The only way was to rename the system and cut the cord to the past...  Windows 7 is very much Windows VIsta, but it is Vista 2009, not Vista 2007-2008. 

I have IT pros at my company that wouldnt touch Vista with a 10 foot pole but are excited about Windows 7.  I think that is good news for MS.  Let the upgrade cycles begin...

figuerres said:

some things to look at:

http://www.phidgets.com/ -- USB based stuff you can get that you can use with a pc and the .net framework.
example:
PhidgetInterfaceKit 8/8/8 w/6 Port Hub cost is $125.00 CAD -- having a problem getting the page to do USD prices.

www.cubloc.com  -- they have some non .net hardware you can hit from a version of basic they use
or they have some CE devices with touch screens.

Cupiditas said:

Sounds like you'd be interested in the Micro Framework.