Channel 9 - Entries tagged with c9 team

Channel 9 has gone global!

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:59:57 GMT

Before we launched the most recent version of Channel 9 we did a lot of work to make sure site performance was acceptable for our users. This involves data collection to try to determine what aspects of the site are slow, and then work to make it all better. At some point though, we run into problems that just can’t be solved.

One of those issues occurs naturally when you have a web site being served from a single location, in our case the United States, to people located all around the world. For some folks the site will be slower than for others, and it seems like there is very little that could be done about this problem. We could move our site hosting to a new location, but that would just move the problem… now different people would have a good connection and others would have a poor one.

Turns out, if you are hosted in Azure, there is a better solution; multiple web servers located in different geographic regions around the world. This is a concept that is used by many large web sites already, but it requires specialized DNS services and (until now) wasn’t something that a ‘regular’ site could take advantage of. Now, using the Windows Azure Traffic Manager (WATM), it is possible to add this functionality to any Windows Azure hosted site by:

Creating multiple instances of your site (placed in different geographic regions),
Creating a ‘performance’ based traffic manager policy,
Adding all of your production instances into this policy, and
Modifying the DNS entry of your site (in our case the entry for channel9.msdn.com) to point at the special DNS name associated with your new WATM policy.

A ‘performance’ based policy, like we are using, sends traffic to the fastest performing active instance in the policy, based on network performance. This is not a real time indicator, but instead is based on aggregate performance data, and so the policy will generally always send a given user to the same location.

You can start out with only a single production instance in the policy (which wouldn’t actually do anything at this point, since all the traffic would be going to that single instance) and then add additional production instances around the world as you wish. In our case we started with three instances:

Our original production site in the North Central US,
A new site in East Asia, and
A new site in Northern Europe

While the exact location of these servers isn’t something that is publically discussed, they correspond to three of the six Windows Azure data centers as shown in this picture.

Recently you may have noticed a new icon along the top of the site

Hovering over this icon will show you the data center you are currently hitting. Hopefully this will be the best data center for you, but if it isn’t there are a few possibilities. One is that the data center you are hitting is truly the fastest option for you (sometimes network performance does not correspond to the real world distances between you and a data center), and the other is that you seem to be coming from a different location than you really should be. One issue to be aware of is that some large shared DNS services can cause this issue, because they can make it seem like you are physically located wherever their DNS servers are sitting… which could be quite far from your actual location. This article discusses the issue with services such as Google’s DNS service and OpenDNS briefly for those of you that are interested.

For more information on the Windows Azure Traffic Manager, check out this episode of Cloud Cover!

Goodbye 9: Nic Fillingham Exit Interview

Charles, Larry Larsen — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:23:56 GMT

Nic Fillingham is moving on from Channel 9. It's been a fun four years or so and he's done some great stuff as a member of our small team. Nic's the guy behind Channel 9 Live and he's helped to improve the physical quality of Channel 9 media (16x9, 720p HD, etc). He's also been the champion of live streaming for our key events.

Nic will be heading to the Windows Live team where he'll be working on the Hotmail product as a program manager repsonsible for...something. This is Nic's lifelong dream and we're happy to see it finally realized

Best of luck, mate. We'll miss you!

Channel 9 Exit Interview: Tina Moving to Xbox Team

Charles — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:00:00 GMT

Tina is leaving Channel 9 to join the Xbox team. In her new role, she'll continue to make great content for Xbox Live that you can watch on your Xbox. Congratulations, Tina! Xbox is lucky to get you.

Tina's done great things on C9 over the years and we will certainly miss her mellow, friendly spirit. You know Tina from the Tech with Tina and the Office Show. She also produced the great History of Microsoft and Visual Studio Documentary series. Remember those! Tina helped bring TV quality production to C9.

In this video, we chat about what's next for Tina and learn why she's moving to the Xbox team.

Spelling, Code Blocks and Twitter on Channel 9

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:14:00 GMT

Hey folks, I thought I'd take a moment to update you on what the dev team has been working on recently, including spell checking in the editor, a slick way to insert code snippets and some already deployed features that you may or may not have noticed.

We asked nicely and were given the code behind the 'insert code' button on MSDN's editor (from their forums) and between Nathan and myself we were able to wrestle it into place onto our site. Not a lot of work in truth, but we needed to replace their script and css references with ones that work for us and build a simple service that takes in code and returned styled html (for the preview function). Of course, sending all sorts of code and markup to that service was causing the ASP.NET Request Validation to freak out, so that had to be selectively disabled ... isn't web development fun!

Next up came the addition of spell checking.... which TinyMCE already includes a plug in for, with all the client side code already in place to break up the text into small chunks and send it off to a server side encoded into a block of JSON. The server side code they supply is php though, which is workable on our IIS boxes, but would involve a fair bit of custom work for a relatively small feature and either calls a console app (aspell ?) or calls out to Google. Neither of those options seemed that appealing, so I wrote a service that works with the Live (Bing!) Search APIs and does the same thing.

I'm still doing some testing with this service, but so far it seems to be working out fine... English only at the moment, but the Live API certainly supports more options so I'll add more options in the future.

And last, but not least, I thought I'd talk about a feature that was rolled out a while back; the addition of MSDN/Twitter/DotNetShoutout to the 'Share' drop down on videos.

Ages back, Erik converted our 'share' options to be pulled from a database, with the idea that we'd add new ones from time to time, and now we finally have! In a recent update we added Twitter, DotNetShoutout and support for the MSDN bookmarking service.

We toyed with the idea of a 'send to twitter' option for awhile, but once you put our URL into a tweet, we are either over 140 characters or we've hardly left any room for you to talk about the content! That meant that the deployment of a twitter link was dependent on the use of some form of URL shortening service. We have all sorts of reasons why we'd rather not use any of the existing services (bing problems url shortening canonical for some of these reasons), so now the twitter button had to wait on the creation of our own URL shortening service.

Enter the C9 url shortening service

Not really a replacement for Tiny URL or any of those services, as ours only works for our content, but definitely what we needed so that we could (1) create short URLs that we control to prevent future broken links and (2) create them algorithmically so that we didn't have to make an external service call to display the twitter link on our page.

The formula is simple, just turn the Entry ID of our post, which is a long into a short string by Base-36 encoding it and then stick 'http://ch9.ms/' onto the front of it. This produces reasonably short URLs, and can be computed at either end without any need for a database look up. The result, a URL like http://ch9.ms/A49H is then used in creating the twitter link.

You can access the twitter link from the little 'share' drop down below each post, which is another interesting bit of code

This drop down and the 'Formats' drop down for downloadable media files share a common set of code and both support the storing of user preferences. It was our thought that most people have a single way that they usually will want to share a link and a single file format they usually want to download, so when you pick an item from either of these lists, we store your choice in a local cookie. Then, when you visit that page again later or any other page on C9 with the same drop down on it, we'll remember your choice and make that the default choice shown in the drop down. Of course, you can pick something different at anytime, so if you like to use Twitter most of the time and then feel like trying out DotNetShoutout you are not blocked in anyway!

When will we see those editor updates?
Soon... I'm still working on them, trying to make sure they are stable and reliable before we deploy them, but I definitely expect them live within a week!

Silverlight support for Chrome and other site updates

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:23:00 GMT

Hey folks, since the last C9 Team post, we've deployed (to C9, C8 and Edge) the TinyMCE editor that I talked about last time, and we've made some other small fixes and changes as well. The editor problem where you couldn't put in a link to another page on C9 has been resolved... check out this page on the TinyMCE Wiki if you'd like to know specify relative or absolute URL behavior on your own site(s). We also fixed the Add/Reply buttons in Safari and Chrome, so those buttons will be styled normally for you WebKit folks now.

We also resolved the weird 'go to a random page when you click Reply and are not signed in' bug... although we have degraded the experience a bit there. When you do a Live ID sign in, you can't include query string parameters or anything after a hash mark, so to keep track of the fact that you wanted to reply to comment x, we used to send you to a special URL (something like /replyto/) and that would then construct the appropriate URL to put you on the right page, with the editor open and the focus in the right spot to post your comment. That wasn't working reliably, so when we were trying to fix the 'go to a random page' bug we switched to just sending you back to the post you were on when you clicked reply. Yes, this means you have to click 'Reply' again, and we aren't happy with that, but that is at least consistent so it is the current state.

Finally, and this should be interesting to the approximately 8% of you using one of these browsers, I tweaked the Silverlight detection code to treat Chrome and Safari on Windows as supported. I've only tested in the latest version of both of these (I happen to be writing this post in Chrome 2.0.172.28 right now since I was just testing it), but let me know if you run into any issues.

Fun C9 Fact: According to the Geographic info in WebTrends, when you view our traffic by city, London is #1 at 4.5% of our total traffic, and you don't hit Redmond, WA until #3 (1.4%).

Update on some new site features coming in the near future

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:28:00 GMT

Hey folks, Duncan from the dev team here. Just wanted to give you a heads up that we'll be rolling out some new features along with a list of bug fixes in the next few days.

The main new feature is a completely new editor. We've moved to TinyMCE for the commenting and creating new threads, and along with that move we've fixed a few of the issues that have been brought up around the editing experience. For one, we'll have a emoticon drop down finally and the insert image and insert URL dialogs should be much faster and simpler to use.

At the same time as this update, we'll be rolling out fixes to some bugs that you've reported, including seeing the 'subject' field in some cases when commenting on videos, the fact that the 'all forums' feed is not updating and others.