Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Channel 9 Team

Windows 8 App for Channel 9 now available

Cara, Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:17:52 GMT

You’ve seen this app before in various forms (we had a version in the consumer preview for Windows 8, and a beta up on the forum for awhile), but the v1 release just hit the Windows store.

Features

Pin your favorite shows and keep up to date with Live Tiles
Watch videos with your choice of Progressive or Smooth Streaming technology
Snap our videos to the side and keep watching while doing other things
Download our videos and watch them offline
Search Channel 9 content or Share using the Windows 8 Charms

The app is focused on watching video (you won’t see the forums, or even text-only Coding 4 Fun articles in there at the moment), and includes all of our event sessions in addition to our regular videos.

On the roadmap

Our next step is focused on enabling authentication in the app, connecting you to your account on Channel 9, which would let us bring your queue into the app, video ratings, and more.

Looking forward to your feedback!

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!

Welcome Golnaz to Channel 9

Charles, Golnaz — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:17:37 GMT

Golnaz Alibeigi is our newest addition to the Channel 9 team. She is a recent gradute from the University of California Irvine. Her role for Channel 9 will be site manager and content creator. Contact her at golnazal@microsoft for any website related issues, concerns, requests, comments or anything! She is your new best friend.

Twitter @Golnaz89

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.

Preview The New Channel 9

Jeff Sandquist — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:24:00 GMT

Check out this preview of an all new Channel 9. We're looking forward to your feedback and suggestions. If you are interested in how it was built and the decisions we made about the architecture, check out this video with Charles and Sampy.

Thank you all for your amazing support of Channel 9 and we look forward to seeing what you think of this major release of Channel 9.

-Jeff

Mike Sampson: Inside Rev9

Charles — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:18:00 GMT

A preview version of the new Channel 9 is now available at http://preview.channel9.msdn.com. Please file any bugs or suggestions on Connect.

Mike Sampson (aka Sampy) has done some stellar work with the backend architecture and design of the next version of Channel 9, code named "Rev9," and this fifth version includes a revamped UI and restructured backend.

In this conversation (it's a long and deep one, so set aside some time—it's well worth it), Sampy takes us through how and why he designed the new Channel 9 architecture. "Rev9" appears to be a very scalable and modern system built on tried and true technologies and architectural patterns such as MVC 2.0, Unity (from P&P), NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate, Memcached, Enyim Managed Memcached driver, Azure – Fabric, Storage, Diagnostics, SQL Azure, xUnit (testing only), Live ID, Spark View Engine, Akismet (spam filtering service), AntiXSS, Tinymce, jQuery, and Silverlight.

Sampy's great work is simply astounding. I left his office feeling more confident than ever that Channel 9 will scale to the future and the experience of performance and reliability will be at an all time high. Thank you, Sampy, Duncan, Cara, Geoff, Clint, and Dan. The revolution is now televised and in full swing.

Clint Pranking NicFill

Clint Rutkas — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:42:00 GMT

Nic decided it was a good idea to hide my keys a few weeks back. This was my revenge.

The Future of Channel 9

Jeff Sandquist — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:07:00 GMT

Last week on this week on Channel 9 we announced a project that we’ll use to improve the user experience of Channel 9. This work along with improvements to our content strategy will enable us to bring Channels 8 and 10 content back into Channel 9.

We call this project Revolution 9 and when released it will consolidate Channels 8, 10 and Coding4Fun into Channel 9. The community aspects of Channel 8, will move into Microsoft.com/Student creating one place for students and Microsoft moving forward. TechNet Edge and Mix Online will stay exactly as they are, with no changes.

To find more information on why we’re making the changes on last week's This Week On Channel 9. It does a good job of walking through it in great detail. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll walk you through the experience and our progress towards launch.

Thanks again everyone who visits Channel 9 and our communities. We’re excited about what we have in store for the future and look forward to evolving Channel 9 together.

-Jeff

P.S. There is only one space after each period in this post.

This Week C9: Revolution 9 - The Future of Channel 9

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:08:00 GMT

On a very special episode of This Week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by Jeff, Duncan, and Nishant to talk about the recent survey results, and the Revolution 9 project

- (0:00 - 1:00) Jeff Sandquist, Duncan Mackenzie, and Nishant Kothary
- (1:00 - 1:57) Survey results request by Minh
- (1:57 - 2:47) How we're working on being more transparent including content and our dev team and helping other organizations be more transparent
- (2:47 - 7:20) Jeff discusses the history of Channel 9
- (7:20 - 10:55) Survey Results - The Good
    - High satisfaction with Microsoft
    - Most Important site features: Video interviews, screencasts/podcasts
    - 50% visit daily, 75% visit at least weekly
    - 66% will try a new technology
    - 91% gave verbatim feedback
- (10:55 - 12:23) Channel 9 Traffic
    - 131 Terabytes/Monthly
    - 2.8 Million Minutes/Month
- (12:23 - 15:17) Survey Results - The Bad
    - Site reliability
    - Finding content through search/tags
    - Site organization
    - Satisfaction for non-developers was lower than developer satisfaction
- (15:17 - 16:48) Survey Results - Importance and Usage Graph
- (16:48 - 17:18) RossJ Coffeehouse comment on artificial classification of devs, students, and consumers
- (17:18 - 17:50) Long Zheng blog comment on Evangelism Network and the "dilemma of choosing a community"
- (17:50 - 19:20) Current State of the World - Channel 8, 9, 10, Coding4Fun, Edge, and MIX Online
- (19:20 - 24:00) Future State of the World
    - Channel 10 and Coding4Fun content will now be on Channel 9
    - Existing Channel 8 content moves to Channel 9, while the Microsoft Student site becomes the portal for students
    - Edge and MIX sites stay unchanged
- (24:00 - 25:28) The origins of the Revolution 9 name based on Jamie's PDC artwork and coming full circle to our roots
- (25:28 - 26:10) Revolution 9 is three things - Content, User Experience, and site reliability + features
- (26:10 - 29:00) Content - Common theme is more - Erik Meijer, Silverlight, real world examples, how-to training, Scoble/Rory style interviews, more history of Microsoft
- (29:00 - 40:10) Adding new content, not taking away existing, not one size fits all, different topics, formats, styles, length, continuous evolution.
   - New stuff
   - Learn - Going Deep, 10-4, MSR/Coding4Fun Projects
   - Opinions - Erik Meijer, Anders Hejlsberg, favorite Windows 7 apps
    - Culture - Old-school C9 videos, history of Microsoft
    - Community - Channel 9 Live - Live streaming town halls with leaders at Microsoft, online "bootcamp" for different technologies
    - Grow # of C9 authors
- (40:10 - 54:54) Nishant on User Experience
    - Jeff talks about the Bruce Williams podcast
    - Nishant's dog and how he is on Twitter (@yoweim)
    - How Channel 9 played a huge part in him joining the company
    - Discoverability - Can we help you find content you're searching for or content you find interesting that you weren't searching for. It's too hard to browse through through 1,300+ tags
    - Readability - How consumable is the content, both text and video, ensure the content is pleasing to look at
    - Interactivity - Don't over-complicate interaction model
    - Visual Design - Let the content shine through, design only begins when you launch, it will continue to evolve
- (54:54 - 58:38) Duncan on site reliability
    - Duncan's request for comments
    - SQL Performance Tuning and de-normalization
    - Replacement of Editor control
    - Cross-Browser Compatibility with Chrome/Safari
- (58:38 - 1:05) Duncan on new features
    - Improve video - Windows Media profile, smooth streaming, video bookmarks/chapters
    - Channel 9 Live - Live chat stream in some way (Twitter, uStream-style)
    - Misc - Anonymous comments, spam filtering, star-rating system so more people will use ratings (content recommendations like Netflix)
- (1:05 - 1:07) Recap
- Thank you for being members of the Channel 9 community

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!

Photosynth of the Channel 9 Studio

Jeff Sandquist — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:51:00 GMT

Regular viewers of our This Week on Channel 9 Show might have noticed some improvements in our little studio. Larry Larsen and Nic Fillingham have been hard at work in improving our audio, video production along with the layout of the set.

Larry recently published a photosynth of the Channel 9 Studio. Plenty of improvements in the space and we have a few fun surprises planned for the future.

Stay tuned.

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.

Welcome to the Channel 9 Team Blog

Jeff Sandquist — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:18:00 GMT

Welcome to the Channel 9 Team blog.

You know it is kind of ironic (some would say sad) that the team that for over five years who has worked to communicate what is happening behind the scenes at Microsoft does not have its own blog. Sure, many of us have our own personal blogs, but there is no official place on Channel 9 where we post regularly where we're headed.

So today, we're changing that and have created this new blog as a way to explain where we are headed in the future and to listen in on your feedback. We'll post updates when we have updated the site to fix a bug or added a new feature. You can expect content that is a simple text and sometimes videos from members of the team.

Over the years, the continued growth of Channel 9 has exceeded our wildest expectations and we are humbled by the fact that millions of visitors come to Channel 9 each and every month.

Right now, we are in the early days of planning for the next major release of Channel 9. Our goal with the next release is to focus on the basics from site performance, reliability and content discoverability. We want to deliver on a great experience that makes it easier for you to interact with content, your peers and connect with Microsoft.

So with that stayed tuned for news and updates on what's next for Channel 9 and thank you all for participating.

-Jeff

Oxite, an ASP.NET MVC based blog

Adam Kinney — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:06:00 GMT

When ASP.NET MVC hit like Preview 3 or 4, quite a few of us were saying "We should get together and build new blog software based on MVC, it would be so fun!".

Well as good ideas go sometimes this one passed by the wayside due to lack of time available. Fortunately this is not true, when the Channel9 team had the same idea. They've build a new blog engine called Oxite based on ASP.NET MVC and their experience building sites like Ch9, Ch10, Ch8, Edge and especially MIX Online.

Check it out! Its a very nice feature set for an initial release and its a full working sample for learning ASP.NET MVC.

Congrats, MIX Online and Ch9 dev team!

This Week on C9: Xbox & Zune get updates, C9 gets custom CSS, and autonomous trucks!

Dan Fernandez — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:33:00 GMT

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian are joined by Steve Velat, a PhD student at Univ. of Florida working on cool autonomous robots. This week's news includes:

- Microsoft store launches (1:00 - 1:40)
- The New Xbox Experience is now available including new services like NetFlix, new avatars, and XNA Community games (1:51 - 3:37)
- Windows Live OneCare is discontinued, but Morro will be a free lightweight offering...60% of developed nations don't have up-to-date security protection (higher in emerging markets) (3:37 - 5:09)
- Zune Pass update means that every month you can own 10 songs (5:09 - 6:23)
- Omar Shahine discusses Windows Live updates, and New York Times declares Microsoft the winner of Social Inbox 2.0 (6:23 - 7:40)
- Live Search API adds XML, JSON APIs, removes query limit, and enables you to specify Web, news, images, phonebook, Encarta Instant Answers, etc for search results (7:40 - 9:17)
- CodeProject article shows building a Pan & Tilt camera with object tracking using LEGO NXT (9:17 - 10:25)
- The 9 guy, Brian, and Dan make it on to Microspotting (10:25 - 11:12)
- Rico Mariani, the architect for Visual Studio tooling, discusses the Visual Studio Technology Roadmap (11:12 - 13:10)
- OnMicrosoft video site launches, includes interviews with the Microsoft product teams (13:10 - 14:00)
- Channel 9 dev team adds user-generated CSS extensions and Jamie's built some cool ones already (14:00 - 15:00)
- Charles has a two-part video series with Brian Beckman on state monads and concurrency, Part 1 and Part 2 (15:00 - 15:46)
- Dan's pick of the week: Dan declares Wrath of the Lich King is the most extensible and popular game on the planet. (15:46 - 18:15)
- Brian's pick of the week: Greg Duncan's find on extending VSTS Power Tools with Skype to talk directly to teammates (18:15 - 19:20)
- Steve's pick of the week: Robotic Assisted Convoy Operation - A video clip of automated transport vehicles using IR emitters to drive actual convoy trucks (19:20 - end)

Dev Diary for April 15th

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:36:12 GMT

Just a quick, and poorly filmed, update from the dev team on what we worked on during the last sprint and what we are building right now. Yes the filming is shoddy, and yes the screens are hard to read... we'll get better, but we didn't want to spend a lot of time redoing this one when we know you'd rather we keep focused on developing the dev site

Brian Keller and Dan Fernandez: Name this Show!

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:17:41 GMT

This is Episode #1 of , a weekly recap show of our favorite things for developers including Channel9 videos, samples, bloggers, news, and much more.

This week we cover:

1. MSDN Code Gallery went Live (found on Greg Duncan's Cool Thing of the Day blog)
2. Jason Olsen's App Compat C9 Video
3. Pavel Bansky's Tetris on the .NET Micro Framework
4. C# Future Focus: Dynamic Lookup
5. Dan interviewing April Reagan on MSDN Help
6. Shawn Burke's Tip on disabling optimiziations when debugging reference source code
7. Joel Spolsky on SQL Server 2008 Reset and Phil Factor on Microsoft doing their homework
8. Dan with Scott Guthrie on IIS7 hosters for Mix
9. Dan and Scott Guthrie on Windows, Web, and RIA and talking about how he built the control
10. Brian and Dan mock each other's hair and how he "poked" Dan's wife on Facebook.
11. Facebook releases JavaScript APIs using Nikhil Kothari's Script# Library
12. CodeProject: Eric Williams HTML Editor control article
13. Josh Holmes Code to Live Video: What Richard Hale Shaw finds exciting in C# 3.0
14. Joel Pobar's MSDN Magazine Article: Create Your own Language Compiler, Lawrence Pit's OOK # .NET
15. Second Life replacing their scripting runtime for LSL with Mono and future .NET languages coming.
16. Brian's Pick of the week: Nic Fillingham's Custom Rockband Drum Kit at CES
17. Dan Pick of the week: Greg Dolley's port of Quake 3 from C to C++/CLI
18. It Came from the internets: What every Microsoft employee does on a conference call
19. Recap: email us at bestshow.nospam@microsoft.com and send us your name requests
20. Brian's Superbowl predictions

2/8 Update: Episode 2 is now available.

Welcome Dan Fernandez to the Channel 9 Team!

Charles — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:47:17 GMT

Dan Fernandez has joined the Channel 9 team!!! We are very lucky to have Dan as a.... Tune in and find out.

Building a Silverlight player for Channel 9

Adam Kinney — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:08:50 GMT

Mike Sampson, your friendly-neighborhood media-encoding and SCRUM specialist, lives in the office right next to mine. I managed to walk the 12 steps over there and talk to him about what he's recently been working on, mainly a Silverlight player for version 4 of Channel 9.

He discusses how he was able to reuse the code that comes with Expression Encoder and how, as the developer, he can code the player while the designer David Shadle can work on the design.

A preview of the player is available on Channel 8 today and I'm expecting the player to go live on the Channel 9 beta sometime in the near future.

So long, Adam Kinney...

Rory — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:26:00 GMT

Just as you need someone behind the scenes to articulate the motions of a Muppet^TM for the screen, you also need someone to sit behind a web site and get it to do stuff.

Adam Kinney was such a man (for the web thing - he has not, to my knowledge, except possibly at a few parties, ever been in control of a Muppet^TM).

Adam toiled away for years in the Channel 9 boiler room, knocking pipes with his cyberwrench and other tools, all of which begin with "cyber" to indicate that I'm not really talking about a boiler room. It's a metaphor.

And now he's going. Not very far since his new job leaves him in the same building, in the same office, and so only about ten feet from where I sit, but now it feels like there's a great distance between us.

This is Adam's farewell.

We talked about life as a Channel 9 geek, life in his new shoes, his attempt at conducting business inside Second Life, and more.

For serious, we're going to miss Adam around here. That's going to be cheapened a bit by him still roaming the halls and waving, but we can still pretend he's gone.

Goodbye, Adam Kinney.

I'll see you tomorrow.

Channel9 Version 4: 3 Minutes with the dev team

Mike Sampson — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:46:48 GMT

We're working hard but we'll take three quick minutes to let you know what we're up to.

Enjoy.

Sampy Gets Shot in the Face - A Channel 9 Exclusive

Rory — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 02:07:58 GMT

Yeah - you read it correctly.

Our very own Mike Sampson, known around here as "Sampy", got shot in the face today by Jesse Lewin of 10 fame.

You might be asking yourself: Why?

The answer is simple: Watch the video.

As you know, Channel 9 is all about transparency, and this is a special look inside a couple of Microsoft's odder teams.

If nothing else, you'll at least learn why I love working on Channel 9. Jeff has been the perfect manager - he pretty much just sets us free and trusts us to do our work.

Most of the time, it's perfect.

Today, it got one of our employees shot in the face.

It was fun

Technology Roundtable #1

Rory — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 19:28:24 GMT

You might know him from the .NET Show, but Robert Hess is giving something else a try over here on Channel 9.

It's a new show called "Technology Roundtable", and it's a sort of, well, roundtable discussion between geeks.

To create the show, Robert used that new special 360 degree video camera that MS Research has been putting together. Basically, whoever is speaking will be the person on camera.

So, it's an interesting application of technology as well as a good use of it.

Enjoy, people.