This Week on C9: Project Natal, Qex for SQL, and Bing for Devs

Posted By: Dan Fernandez | Jun 6th @ 9:11 AM | 43,964 Views | 16 Comments
This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian cover the week's top developer news including:

- Microsoft announces Project Natal (pronounced na-tall) for Xbox 360, Dan wants to code it, badly
- Gizmodo - Positive review of Project Natal in action
- Bing launches, including Developer page
- Brandon LeBlanc - Windows Blog - Windows 7 General Availability is scheduled for October 22nd
- Scott Guthrie - IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit step-by-step tutorial
- Nikolai Tillmann - Pex 0.13 Released, Unit Tests as Input and Visual Studio 2010 support, via Peli de Halleux
- Margus Veanes and Pavel Grigorenko - Video of Qex - Symbolic SQL Query Exploration
- Photosynth of Channel 9 Studio, via Larry Larsen and Nic Fillingham
- Gunnar Peipman - Code Snippet for reading embedded files at runtime, via Alvin Ashcraft
- Adam Kinney - Motion Capture viewer in Silverlight
- Habib Heydarian - WPF Visualizer in Visual Studio 2010
- David Ebbo - CodeDom vs T4 for Code Generation
- Dan-el Khen - CodeProject - LINQ to FQL (Facebook Query Language)
- Windows 7 Little Tweaker for 32-bit Windows, via Greg Duncan

- Brian's pick of the week: Watch Netflix videos with friends, Xbox 1080p HD streaming with Zune video
- Dan's pick of the week: Xbox gets Facebook & Twitter integration
Rating:
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#Jun 6th @ 10:05 AM
Bas
Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

The image is still messed up in the Silverlight player for me. It only fills the top 3/4th, with the controls below it, and a black bar below that.

#Jun 6th @ 10:39 AM
Dan
Dan

Weird, it works on my machine Smiley

I tried IE8 and FF 3 and I'm not seeing anything abnormal.

#Jun 6th @ 11:13 AM
Chadk
Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

I have the same problem.

Chrome on Win 7.

#Jun 6th @ 11:21 AM
PerfectPhase
PerfectPhase
"This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

You mean like this?   I assume it's because the video is now 16:9, but the silverlight player is 4:3.

 

I'm not really much of a gamer but an still really intreasted in Natal, really want the media center support, and here's hopping it get support into windows 7 multi-touch and gestures API.

#Jun 6th @ 5:54 PM
Dan
Dan

Here's what I see in IE8/FF3, notice the player is resized automagically to 16:9.

As to the other point, yes, I'm sure folks will find a way to enable it for Windows, like Brian Peek did for us for the Wiimote Coding4Fun wrapper Smiley

But yes, I'm definitely excited for all of the possibilities with this - voice commands, body tracking, gestures, etc.

#Jun 6th @ 6:11 PM
rhm
rhm

That's what it's like until you start playing the video.

Anyway, I have to download all the channel9 videos because the streaming is always stalling for some reason. I guess the downloads come from another server because they come down nice'n'fast.

#Jun 6th @ 6:25 PM
dentaku
dentaku

It looks fine until you start playing the video then you get a 16:9 video playing at the top of a 4:3 black box.

#Jun 6th @ 8:22 PM
Dan
Dan

Got it, yeah, I'm seeing the same thing, I assumed the issue was rendering, but yeah, it's just that the video is 16:9 in a 4:3 player. It looks a lot better just watching/downloading in Windows Media Player/VLC/Your-favorite-player.

@rhm - The streaming file and the download are also coming from the same location so I don't know why streaming would be slower.

#Jun 7th @ 1:35 AM
Bas
Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

Maybe the Silverlight player could be updated to 'letterbox' widescreen videos, instead of placing them at the top. Center it vertically, so that it has even black bars on the top and bottom, and then place the controls at the bottom of the player instead of at the bottom of the video.

Or just autoresize the entire player, of course. Smiley

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