Building Channel 9: Inside EvNet - Part 2 | Going Deep

EvNet, which is the codebase that powers all of our channels, was written from the ground up. How is the codebase designed? What's the architecure? What did each developer work on? What were some of the challenges? Who are these dev geniuses, anyway? This is part two of the great conversation with the awesome folks who build and innovate Channel 9 (and several other web sites). Tune in.

Part 1:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Building-Channel-9-Inside-EvNet-Part-1/

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wisemx Live it

Aug 28, 2008 at 2:42 PM

Very impressive.
HumanCompiler Now with more program management

Aug 28, 2008 at 3:01 PM

Are you talking about Sampy's biceps? I know, right?!?!
wisemx Live it

Aug 28, 2008 at 3:15 PM

No, actually I wasn't going to mention that I really do think they should all hit the gym.
CKurt while( ( !succeed=try() ) ) { }

Aug 28, 2008 at 3:18 PM

Hi,

Very nice video, alot has been talk about. I wonder if you guys have any data about if a video is watched a 100 times. ow many times it it via the silverlight player ? how manytimes via zune ? It would really interest me.

Because for now I feel Windows Media Player gives me a better experience than silverlight. But Silverlight could do so much better
e.g. :

# I would love controls in full screen view (especialy drag the slide and volume because pauze is already there)
# See the time stamp of the slider change while you drag.
# I would love chapsters in video's ( almost every video has a section 'about the people' and 'about the subject' )
# With 'This week on C9' would really be lovely to skip a part of the video where thay talk about something you acualy saw the whole video of, previously that week. Without loading that part of the video over the network.
# Adaptive Streaming ? Or does it do this allready ? (the player doesn't really show an indication)

But anywho, great work guys ! It's very nice to see you need to maintain so many site's with a so little group of people !
littleguru <3 Seattle

Aug 28, 2008 at 3:34 PM

I would love to get the .plan on what the team does
Duncanma "yeah that's awful close, but that's not why I'm so hard done by"

Aug 28, 2008 at 4:36 PM

ouch...
Charles Welcome Change

Aug 28, 2008 at 4:42 PM

BTW, Duncan can do more pull-ups than anybody around here (at least Jeff's team, but it extends beyond us...).

C
wisemx Live it

Aug 28, 2008 at 5:11 PM

Cool...btw, I'm 47 now but still live by a strict code. (USMC) Ooh Rah!
Maddus Mattus Maddus on C9, Is often controversial, But fun none-the-less -evildictaitor

Aug 29, 2008 at 2:19 AM

All my questions got answered!

Very, very, very nice. Good to see the team behind the code

Niners rock, but the people who facilitate this rock even more,... That would make them made of granite or something,...
jh71283 Throw new System.Beverage. OutOfCoffeeException()

Aug 29, 2008 at 4:37 AM

next time give Nathan a mic
figuerres ???

Aug 29, 2008 at 7:36 AM

very cool....

random results:

Sampy and the "Locking" I recall when you posted about adding locks and how it fixed problems, Yeah I kind of figured it was a case like that. funny how in some cases serial is better than parallel

lots of cool info from all of you.

Duncan: things we can't see may still be interesting to us... I have a few background things I do that are like that. I think it is important for developers to know / learn about having more than one tool / more than one way to takle a problem.

Cool!
The Hustler 'He Want's To Be A Hero'

Aug 29, 2008 at 11:14 AM

well done
figuerres ???

Aug 29, 2008 at 11:48 AM

Hmmm.... ya know the old finger the plan is reallly close to what a blog does....
the difference is the blog keeps a history of the posts, the old .plan was just one file that got updated.

what about a new "XML .xplan" format that hijacks the ideas of feeds/blogs and rss ??

so you have a .xplan file on the network somewhere and you can have an xplan reader in the code of the site / also a web serivce that hands you an xplan formated document....

post to upate your "Plan" in place of "edit blog post"

kinda rough but seems doable w/o a ton of work I think....
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

Aug 29, 2008 at 1:07 PM

Well, that was a sly way of dodging my questions.

Nice set of videos though, guys. Very informative. Is it just me, or does publishing a video seem like an incredible amount of work? The explanation alone lasted eight minutes or so.
HumanCompiler Now with more program management

Aug 29, 2008 at 2:06 PM

It is, but compared to doing all the work yourself it's way less time than it used to be. Also, our current sprint has been focusing on streamlining the process to make it a lot easier.

Also, Sampy was explaining the guts of how it works (since he built it), which could make it seem more complicated than it really is for our content producers.

What questions did we dodge?
Ion Todirel buuu

Aug 30, 2008 at 12:12 PM

super awesome
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

Sep 01, 2008 at 2:26 PM

I may have missed them (or simply forgotten about them) in that huge video, but I don't recall hearing what exactly was done to fix the performance problems that used to appear solely outside the US, and while javascript performance was touched on briefly at the end, I didn't hear what, specifically, you guys did to optimize your scripts.
HumanCompiler Now with more program management

Sep 01, 2008 at 10:17 PM

We didn't talk about what we did for the international slowness because we didn't do anything about the international slowness specifically. Basically, any performance enhancements we do related to the client (html, css, javascript) help exponentially as requests come from fruther and further away from our servers.

As for how we helped javascript performance, yah, we covered most of that. Nathan talked about crunching (javascript and css) and making sure as much data as possible being sent down to the client is gzipped. Nathan's also working on a system to dynamically send out html, css and javascript. This will enable us to take things like the editor (rendered at the bottom of any page where you can create/reply) and only send them down to the client on an as needed basis. This will save a big portion of the page from having to come down.
ChrisStepaniuk

Sep 05, 2008 at 9:41 PM

I have an obvious question which i'll probably get shot for... why not use youtube? It's there for just this purpose, sharing videos? You could still post other content which we can download. Half the time the silverligth player doesn't load, takes too long, my browser hangs, and on my boyfriends mac, silverlight loads, but the player is inusuable. It doesn't load correctly. It looks like your starting at a picture through a foggy window.
markshiffer

Sep 09, 2008 at 7:54 AM

Great technical overview guys. Thanks.

Wanted to mention that Sampy reminds me of 'Mark' from Empire Records. Anyone concur?