The Channel 9 beta has been updated
- Posted: Sep 29, 2007 at 2:42 AM
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Hey folks, it has been awhile since we first published the Channel 9 beta site and we thought you might be wondering where we are with the whole 'new Channel 9' project. Well, we have been moving forward on many different areas of the code and we even
shipped a new production site (http://Channel8.msdn.com) built on the exact same code base. All of the work done since we last updated the beta site is hard to describe in a few lines of text, but let me give it a shot
anyway 
First and foremost, we have added the idea of 'managed tag pages'. These pages take the idea of filtering content by a certain tag and then add in the concept of an 'editor' for that tag's area. The editor will be your guide to the topic in question, selecting content from Channel 9 to feature on the page, blogs that should be included and more. We haven't fully configured it, but you can see an example of what I mean on the Silverlight tag page, where Adam Kinney is designated as the ownere of that page. You still get your straight filtered list of videos (right in the what's new area) but you can also see recommended or featured content along the upper right. We have more planned for the managed tag pages, but for now I hope this gives you an idea of what is to come in that area.
The other major change is around the style of the site. In addition to a ton of minor changes, (many of which were as a direct result of feedback from you Niners), the site was made much more consistent overall. The fonts, HTML tags and information displayed have been standardized around the site; an entry displayed in the sidebar on one page should look exactly like another... this has the benefit of a better experience for you, and it also really simplifies our code, which is a great help for when we need to make ongoing changes or even launch a new site based off the same code.
Finally, we heard your comments around the new AJAX asynchronously loading of posts, threads and comments, and we acted on some of that feedback in this update. Your back button should work now, even when all you are doing is paging through the videos on the media page or all the comments on the current post. If you watch the address bar you'll also see that the page number is part of the URL, and that it is being updated as you page back and forth. With those URLs you'll be able to link someone right into a specific page in a discussion, as requested by your feedback on the first Beta site we shipped. The AJAX features have a bunch of other improvements added to them as well, including a 'throbber' animation to let you know when we are loading data and other less obvious changes.
Check it out over at http://beta.channel9.msdn.com and let us know what you think in the beta forum here on C9.
About the video: This was made today by Erik (HumanCompiler here on C9) and Sampy, shortly after we shipped this update... and was, as many of you already know, inspired by the recent set of Halo 3 videos
First and foremost, we have added the idea of 'managed tag pages'. These pages take the idea of filtering content by a certain tag and then add in the concept of an 'editor' for that tag's area. The editor will be your guide to the topic in question, selecting content from Channel 9 to feature on the page, blogs that should be included and more. We haven't fully configured it, but you can see an example of what I mean on the Silverlight tag page, where Adam Kinney is designated as the ownere of that page. You still get your straight filtered list of videos (right in the what's new area) but you can also see recommended or featured content along the upper right. We have more planned for the managed tag pages, but for now I hope this gives you an idea of what is to come in that area.
The other major change is around the style of the site. In addition to a ton of minor changes, (many of which were as a direct result of feedback from you Niners), the site was made much more consistent overall. The fonts, HTML tags and information displayed have been standardized around the site; an entry displayed in the sidebar on one page should look exactly like another... this has the benefit of a better experience for you, and it also really simplifies our code, which is a great help for when we need to make ongoing changes or even launch a new site based off the same code.
Finally, we heard your comments around the new AJAX asynchronously loading of posts, threads and comments, and we acted on some of that feedback in this update. Your back button should work now, even when all you are doing is paging through the videos on the media page or all the comments on the current post. If you watch the address bar you'll also see that the page number is part of the URL, and that it is being updated as you page back and forth. With those URLs you'll be able to link someone right into a specific page in a discussion, as requested by your feedback on the first Beta site we shipped. The AJAX features have a bunch of other improvements added to them as well, including a 'throbber' animation to let you know when we are loading data and other less obvious changes.
Check it out over at http://beta.channel9.msdn.com and let us know what you think in the beta forum here on C9.
About the video: This was made today by Erik (HumanCompiler here on C9) and Sampy, shortly after we shipped this update... and was, as many of you already know, inspired by the recent set of Halo 3 videos
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I still can't sign-in.....
I know I can be harsh at times, I know how hard developing is...
first impression right now is "Good Job Guys!"
one thing though is the Live / Passport login is still not there yet I see.
but the page load / with the throbber is MUCH better.
generaly looks much nicer.
Now if we can get some weekly / bi-weekly updates till it's done.
If you go into a forum you can't see as many posts as you used to in one window because each line in the list takes up way more space now. (does that make sense?)
They're packed together more closely in the old forums but it's not crowded so I can't see why stuff is spaced out so far in the beta forums.
The wmv stream sounds fine though. This is with XP in Firefox & IE6. Using the integrated audio on my nForce mainboard, and audio is fine in everything else.
Any ideas whats wrong with silverlight?
For anyone who can't sign in still please send mail to ch9@microsoft.com
Thanks, figuerres! We're glad you like what you're seeing.
Windows Live ID support didn't make it into this sprint. It'll get in there eventually for sure.
We will definitely be updating you more on the beta now. What we'd like to do in all our future sprints until C9v4 is done, is do at least one update to the beta every sprint. We may mostly focus on whatever other things we need to do, but want to show progress on C9v4 every sprint if possible.
Are you looking at the site in IE? I currently have some CSS problems in IE that are making rows much taller than they're supposed to be. If you look at the site in Firefox or Opera (possibly even Safari) you should see the rows aren't as tall. That said, the rows are going to be a bit taller than in the current site because of us making our templates consistent across the site (the posted by always being under the title that's always the same colors, etc).
Your situation sounds specific to your machine, but I don't know what it would be. Did you install a lot of the alphas and betas of Silverlight? I've heard of people having problems with it then. Try uninstalling any version of Silverlight you have on your machine and reinstalling Silverlight 1.0 and let us know if it still doesn't work for you.
That's exactly the point (of ours and the original Halo 3 commercial). Good to know we pulled it off.
Silverlight Player looks good and quality and stuff is good.
Their is a problem though with silverlight, I have silverlight version 1.1 installed on one of my machine and 1.0 on other.
As per the silverlight team that if you have 1.1 installed the video should play but actually there is some bug with it, silverlight keeps on asking me to install the 1.0 version and when i try to install it it give me a error saying a higher version is already installed. Everytime I have to uninstalled 1.1 and install 1.0 to view the video but then when I am working with 1.1 i am required to install 1.1 and then channel 9 videos cannot be viewed.
You need to test this further, as most of us are developer on this site, we are more likely to have 1.1 version installed and it's just a headache to do the above part everytime I need to see a video. Talk to silverlight team to fix it up or work out which version is installed on the browser and accordingly show the player.. Do something... I am just getting annoyed by this every single day...
Thanks
Atul
The error is "Unable to load media mms://mschnlnine.wmod.llnwd.net/a1809/d1/on10/6/8/9/8/1/BelieveV4_s_on10.wmv"
I've tested the URL in WMP and it works fine.
Might this be to do with my proxy server?
The most important thing about Channel 9 is content, and if you take up most of the screen with an empty header with nothing in it, you're detracting from people finding content.
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/
Subscribe to the UIE RSS feed, these guys know tons about usability. Saw Jared Spool during the WebDesignWorld 2007 in Seattle, and the 3 hours listening to him was worth the whole trip.
The menu bar is also 40px high, try and squeeze it down to 30px is will look a lot cleaner.
I do like the Silverlight video integration into the pages
How ironic, welcome to our world
(Kidding really, please don't throw stuff at me!!)
Have you thought about just slapping user ratings on content?
Yup! We haven't figured out where that fits in time-wise for us yet, but we have talked about it a lot.
Managed tag pages are more of a guide for a topic that someone who is in charge of it has decided is the right content. For example, if you've never done any Silverlight before, when you go to the Silverlight managed tag page, you'll instantly have pointers to the content you should be looking at to get started, decided by someone (whoever runs the managed tag page) who works with Silverlight for their job every day.
You can bet that when we do have user ratings someday, we'll add that section to managed tag pages too.
.
I like that idea. It'd also allow you to see the progress of a certain technology. Say you have a bunch of videos created during the development of, say, WHS. Then you could eventually see the announcement video, a beta video, and the RTM announcement video all on the same managed page.
"Managed tag pages are more of a guide for a topic that someone who is in charge of it has decided is the right content."
I just had another look at the tag pages to understand how they work. I think it would make more sense to "sticky" any recommended content to the top of a list (and make it stand out), rather than provide an alternate page view and hide all the other relevant content.
There's currently no consistency when you go from the Internet Explorer tag page and then to the Silverlight tag page. Talk about a usability nightmare.
On another note, the fonts tend to change their appearance significantly depending on their size, colour and weight. It makes it pretty difficult to read. It looks like a Vista font.
well I think this page:
http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/Tags/
is a mess but the pages it points too are ok.
i have seen some "tag" bars on blogs and such that look like a "Ransom Note" IMHO... totally junk.
I guess the /Tags/ page should have some kind of format
seems to me that it is an index based on what I see so I would do that as a list or a tree.
A
B
C
and so on.
if it's just a mass of links with no stucture then how is the eye supposed to use it?
Go ask Bill Hill for some input on this one... see what he says!
I was using IE7 in Vista. I think it works fine, it's just the way the site is designed which uses up more space.
Here's a comparison of the old forum and the new forum.
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/2723/c9forumsba5.jpg
I decided to try it out on a machine running XP and found that it's a mess in IE6 but works in Firefox.
http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/8060/c9forumsxpie6ff107sc3.jpg
Lots of developers here that wont be able to view Channel 9 Forums.
Hint hint : google for "fourth largest bank in the united states", the name of the company is in the first search result.
The "Showcase" (I'm personally not a fan of that name...maybe "Featured" instead, but oh well) section are the posts that the editor has deemed important for people to look at. The What's New section is just the river of content for that tag. Soooo, they are "sticky"...even more so than just putting them at the top. They're in their own section.
That's the entire point. We don't want visual consistency between managed and unmanaged tag pages. We want managed tag pages to stand out and be more than just a river of content. That said, if you click on "View All" in the "What's New (Media)" section or click on "Media" in the subnav, it will take you to a page that is exactly the same as an unmanaged tag page (like your Internet Explorer example).
Can you point at particular examples (screenshots maybe) and let us know what browser you're running.
As always, remember this is just a beta. We're not done yet. While we're 100 times further along than the last beta, we're still nowhere near done.
Don't worry about this page right now. We ran out of time to do with it what we wanted. We just brought it "up to par with C9 Classic" for now. We have plans for this page that are pretty much the same as what you suggest. Sooooo, good thinkin'.
I seriously have no idea what you're talking about. WebSensed?
I currently have some issues in IE 7 with the CSS. If you compare it to FF, you will see it's a bit closer to the way the forums currently are. The way FF is, is the way we intended it to look. Granted, we do have two lines instead of one now, but we wanted to be consistent with the rest of the site in how we presented the data.
Yes, IE 6 is currently unsupported for the beta. We are debating whether or not to support it long term since IE 7 has been out for over a year now and is a required Windows Update. We are undecided at this moment.
Also, for those interested, here's where we stand on browser support for our platform in general:
I think he means that the beta site is getting blocked / banned by the firewall / Proxy server he has to pass thru at work.
not surprising really I know many corp. networks block a lot of the internet from internal staff use for many legal and work related resons....
linkage: http://www.websense.com/global/en/
cool! no big...
now if we could just tell folks who have the "Ransom Note Tags" how ugly they are...
Yup, that's the plan. The skin you see on the silverlight player is basically just a modified base player from Expression Media Encoder. You can check out a video of Sampy talking about our player for more details.
There will be a design change for the player in a later release. For now, you can double click the video while it's playing to go full screen.
Gotchya. I wonder why the beta and not c9 classic? Maybe because the word beta is in the url? Maybe because of using javascript? hhhmmm. I'd like to know why.
Whitespace? Where?
Probably because of 'beta'; Channel 9 as is already uses javascript in the form of postbacks and the community bar, and I kinda doubt they'd block js in the first place, let alone have specific knowledge of asp.net postbacks
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