C9Team

Announcing Channel 9 Live at PDC09

Nic Fillingham — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:55:00 GMT

The Channel 9 team is excited to announce that they will be broadcasting LIVE and unscripted from the PDC Big Room for all three days of the Professional Developers Conference 2009.

Who will be on Channel 9 Live at PDC09?

We'll be publishing the full schedule very soon but for now here's a taste of some of the awesome guests we have lined up: Mark Russinovich, Patrick Dussud, Steve Marx, Bob Muglia, Dave Campbell, Yousef Khalidi, Ray Ozzie, Erik Meijer, Kurt DelBene, Scott Guthrie, Don Box, Chris Anderson, Gary Flake, Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell (.NET Rocks).

Plus your favorite Channel 9 personalities including Charles Torre, Scott Hanselman, Robert Hess, Mike Swanson, Jennifer Ritzinger, Nic Fillingham, Dan Fernandez and Jeff Sandquist.

When will this take place?

Tuesday (Immediately following the Day 1 keynote) 10:30AM – 5:30 PM Pacific Standard Time
Wednesday (Immediately following the Day 2 keynote) 11:00AM – 5:30 PM Pacific Standard Time
Thursday 10:30AM – 3:30 PM Pacific Standard Time

Watch and ask questions

To watch, go to www.microsoftpdc.com
To participate and ask questions, send a tweet to @ch9live
PDC attendees can drop by the Channel 9 Live stage in the Big Room to be part of the action in person

If you have any questions about Channel 9 Live at PDC09 let us know in the comments section.

Countdown to PDC show will be live today at 12PM PST

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:28:00 GMT

At 12PM Pacific Standard Time (PST), Mike Swanson, Jennifer Ritzinger, and special guest star Nic Fillingham will do the Countdown to PDC show live!

To watch, go to: www.microsoftpdc.com

The show will be interactive and you can get your questions answered live by replying to @ch9live on Twitter.

FAQ:

Q: Do I need anything special to watch the live stream?
A: You just need Silverlight installed.

Q: How do I watch the live stream?
A: Go to www.microsoftpdc.com at 12PM PST

Q: How can I participate?
A: Send questions or comments by replying to the @ch9live Twitter account during the live broadcast at 12PM Pacific Standard Time.

Q: Will the content be available afterwards?
A: Yes, we’ll be uploading the recording for anyone that can’t tune in during that time.

Q: Will you do it live?
A: WE’LL DO IT LIVE!

Announcing Channel 9’s first live broadcast - This Week on C9 this Friday!

Dan Fernandez — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:03:00 GMT

Updated: Watch us live at http://live.ch9.ms today at 3:00 PM PST!

Mark your calendars, on Friday, November 6^th at 3:00PM Pacific Standard Time, Channel 9 will host its first live broadcast for This Week on Channel 9! We’ll have a special Web page setup for our live streaming player and you’ll be able to ask us questions in real-time via Twitter. Start following @ch9live on Twitter for more information.

FAQ:

Q: Do I need anything special to watch the live stream?
A: You just need Silverlight installed.

Q: How do I watch the live stream?
A: We’ll be posting the URL Friday morning PST?

Q: How can I participate?
A: Send questions or comments by replying to the @ch9live Twitter account during the live broadcast at 3PM Pacific Standard Time.

Q: Will the content be available afterwards?
A: Yes, we’ll be uploading the recording for anyone that can’t tune in during that time.

Q: Will you do it live?
A: WE’LL DO IT LIVE!

A tour of the new Channel 9 Learning Center

Dan Fernandez — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:12:00 GMT

Today we officially launched a new area on Channel 9, the Channel 9 Learning Center. This is an area where we’ll provide free training courses (videos, hands-on labs, and code samples) on emerging products and technologies, with our first set of training courses being Windows 7 and Visual Studio. As more products/technology betas get released, you can expect us to add additional training courses into the Learning Center. For more information on training courses, subscribe to the Learn blog which will have regular updates on new and upcoming content on the Learning Center.

Why are we doing this?

One of the key pieces of feedback from our Channel 9 user survey is that you wanted more technical content, especially on new products and technologies. Our goal with learning centers is to make it easy for developers to pick up and play with new products, APIs, SDKs, etc and to make the learning experience social. This is our first step towards that goal.

Taking a tour

To get a feel for the Channel 9 Learning Center, we wanted to give you a quick screenshot tour of what’s included.

Learning Center Home Page

The Learning Center home page includes the aforementioned Learning team’s blog and the list of courses on the right side. For our tour, we’ll click into the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course.

Visual Studio 2010 Training Course Home page

This is the home page for a training course and it includes:

· Breadcrumb navigation at the very top for easy navigation.

· A list of pre-requisites including experience or tools, frameworks, and SDKs you need to complete the course.

· Each course is broken down into a set of topics or units like Managed Language, ASP.NET 4, the Data Platform and so forth.

· The full training kit is available for download in the top right corner for anyone looking to do offline learning.

· The list of team members who built the training course are in the right column.

Managed Languages page

Here you’ll find a set of videos and hands-on labs that cover that particular topic. Note that Hands-on labs have the orange bubbly beaker image icon.

Hands on labs – Introduction to F#

Each hands on lab comes with

· A table of contents with all of the exercises for the Hands-on lab

· A download link to download the hands-on lab for offline use and any associated source code examples

· The ability to share (on Twitter, Facebook, etc), rate, and comment on the lab

· A list of resources for the Hands-on lab.

Inside a Hands-On lab

Once you’re inside the Hands-On lab, there’s a two column layout, the left column represent the Hands-on lab content and the right column provides quick navigation to other parts of the Hands on lab.

At the end of each lab exercise, you’ll also see a convenience link to jump to the next exercise in the Hands-on lab.

Feedback

Well, that’s our quick and dirty tour, as always, we’re open to your feedback and we hope you find this type of technical content valuable.

Cheers,

The Channel 9 & Learning Team

Introducing the new home for Windows on Channel 9

Charles — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Windows is one of the world's most complex pieces of software. The latest edition of Microsoft's general purpose operating system, Windows 7, is our best offering yet. The efficient and focused engineering and thoughtful design that went into Windows 7 deserves an efficient and well designed home on Channel 9. It was the least we could do. Further, as the title of this post suggests, this area of Channel 9 will accommodate future iterations of Windows, so don't just think of this as the Windows 7 area on C9 (it is today and for the next chunk of time between Windows iterations). It's the home for Windows on Channel 9.

We figured it would be a really good idea to break Windows down into three broad "pillars" that match our significant Windows content repository. So, if you want to learn about how to develop for Windows 7, we've categorized all of our programming content to fit neatly under a new C9 "taskbar" button, Programming Windows 7. If you want to learn about how to use Windows 7 and take advantage of its new user features, click on the Using Windows 7 "taskbar" button. If you want to know how Windows 7 works, the nuts and bolts, the engine room, well, you'll want to click on the Under the Hood "taskbar" button.

Enjoy and happy learning!

C9 Team

Canonical and ShortUrl on Channel9

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:11:00 GMT

One of the things we spend time on for Channel 9 is trying to make sure we are following the right standards, adopting new ones as necessary and that we render correctly for both real people and for search engines. As part of that ongoing work, we recently adopted two new concepts.

Canonical URL

The first is the concept of a canonical URL, as described here by Matt Cutts (his blog is a must read for anyone building public facing web sites); a link element that specifies what our definitive single URL should be for any given post.

Why does this matter? Well, on many web sites (including ours) there is more than one URL that will get you to the same piece of content. Consider the latest 'This Week On Channel 9' episode, it is available at:

Assuming Google/Bing/Yahoo only found the post from links on the Channel 9 home page, it would always see the first one... and everything would be great. That isn't how search engines work though, they care about inbound links from many different sources, and it is possible that many different URLs are out there in the wild that really represent the same single piece of content. Each additional URL beyond the first looks like duplicate content and takes away from the search engine love that should be given to the first result. The standard way to avoid this in the past was to redirect every person coming in on anything but the link we want. That works, but forcing your user to go through an extra browser round trip for some obscure technical reason is less than ideal. Enter the idea of the canonical url. Add this to your page and no matter how the search engine finds the page, it knows what URL to associate it with in the system.

If you check any of those links above and view source, you'll find the same thing on each and every one:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-C9-Windows-7-RTMs-7-Sins-of-App-Compat--cool-Silverlight-apps/" />

A fair number of other sites implement this as well, check out Ars Technica for example, and I'm sure more will follow. Should you implement this on your site? Well, first think about how many duplicate URLs will work on your content (if you are running a site that supports both www.sitename.com and sitename.com, that's one ... then if you can optionally have a filename like default.php or index.html... then that is already two duplicates for every URL) and then think about whether or not your position in search engine rankings is important... odds are you should look at adding support for this link tag on your pages.

ShortUrl

A lot has been written about how services like TinyURL, is.gd and other URL shortening services are bad for the internet, and we completely agree. They remove meaning from the link you are about to click (including the source of the content, which is an important issue for trust and security), and they are dependent on the reliability of some unknown third party that might just go away at some point in the future. One solution, that sites like C9, Amazon and others have decided to go with is to implement their own URL shortening. Yes, much of the meaning is lost, but at least they have control over that URL namespace and can make sure it is always available and always points at the intended content. Now that we have such a service though, what's to stop people from just taking our original URLs and using any one of the free URL shortening services? Well, nothing at the moment, but a movement is underway to allow content owners to specify a pre-existing short URL if they have one. The hope is that once this concept catches on, then URL shortening service or client applications (like twitter clients) will try to look up a site's short url before calling out to a 3rd party service to create one. We don't know if this will catch on, but we like the idea so we've gone ahead and added the appropriate link tag and populated it with our special r.ch9.ms short url. Once again, if you view source on that TWOC9 episode from above, you'll find this:

<link rel="shorturl" href="http://ch9.ms/AAPV" />

More to come...
If you went and viewed the source of those pages, you would have seen a ton of other <link> tags, and many different <meta> tags as well. Each of those does serve a purpose, and I'll dig into the rest of them in upcoming posts.

Note: For those of you who have the immediate response of 'aghhh... so much wasted bandwidth for meta tags!', I know what you mean... and I also know that some sites choose to only render those tags out when a search crawler hits them. That practice is a bit sneaky though, in general you should avoid alterting the content you serve up to search engines... although it is probably only an issue if you change the actual content of the page in an attempt to deceive the search engine.

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.

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/<commentid>) 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