Also, in the efforts to bring the Smooth Streaming experience to everyone the IIS team published the IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1 which is intended to aid the development of rich Smooth Streaming experiences.

Bunch of posts to review if you are not aware of the new releases:

• IIS Media Services 3.0, including IIS Live Smooth Streaming, has been released – Chris Knowlton
• RTW of Live Smooth Streaming is now… Live. – John Bocharov
• IIS Media Services 3.0 and Player SDK released! – Alex Zambelli
• IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit 1.0 – Beta 1 Released – Vishal Sood

I’m very excited with this release, as we have been using the Smooth Streaming Media Element almost from its beginning mainly for the work we did for the NBC Sunday Night Football event. (see here & here). I will start sharing with you how to take advantage of the SSME.

In this post I will show you how easy is to bring an Slow Motion experience using the SSME. Vishal blogged a great SSME getting started guide that I encourage you  to review before digging into the details of this post.

Adding support for Slow Motion to your Smooth Player is really easy, and basically what you have to do is getting the playback rates between 0.0 and 1.0, and move across them every time you click your Slow Motion button on the player.

Below you will find a code snippet ready to be used that will help you to implement the Slow Motion logic.

private List<double> slowMotionPlaybackRates;
/// <summary>
/// Toogles the PlaybackRate of the Smooth Streaming Media Element.
/// Uses the PlaybackRates between 0.0 and 1.0 to support Slow Motion.
/// </summary>
public void OnSlowMotion()
{
    // PlaybackRate index to set on the SSME.
    int newPlaybackRateIndex = 0;
    // Verify the state of the SmoothPlayer
    if (this.SmoothPlayer.CurrentState == MediaElementState.Paused
        || this.SmoothPlayer.CurrentState == MediaElementState.Playing
        || this.SmoothPlayer.CurrentState == MediaElementState.Buffering)
    {
        // Get the current PlaybackRate of the SSME
        double playbackRate = this.SmoothPlayer.PlaybackRate;
        // The first time we get the SlowMotion PlaybackRates from
        // the SSME supported PlayBackRates. SlowMotion PlaybackRates 
        // are between 0.0 and 1.0.
        if (this.slowMotionPlaybackRates == null)
        {
            this.slowMotionPlaybackRates = new List<double>();
            IList<double> supportedPlaybackRates = this.SmoothPlayer.SupportedPlaybackRates;
            for (int i = 0; i < supportedPlaybackRates.Count; i++)
            {
                if (supportedPlaybackRates[i] > 0.0 && supportedPlaybackRates[i] < 1.0)
                {
                    this.slowMotionPlaybackRates.Add(supportedPlaybackRates[i]);
                }
            }
            this.slowMotionPlaybackRates.Add(1.0);
        }
        // Verify if the current PlaybackRate is within the 
        // allowables values. Get the index of the new 
        // PlaybackRate to set.
        if (playbackRate <= 0.0 || playbackRate >= 1.0)
        {
            newPlaybackRateIndex = 0;
        }
        else
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < this.slowMotionPlaybackRates.Count; i++)
            {
                if (this.slowMotionPlaybackRates[i] == playbackRate)
                {
                    newPlaybackRateIndex = (i + 1) % this.slowMotionPlaybackRates.Count;
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        this.SmoothPlayer.SetPlaybackRate(this.slowMotionPlaybackRates[newPlaybackRateIndex]);
    }
}

Hope you find the code snippet useful. Stay tuned!, new posts are coming.

PS: If you face any issue with the Smooth Streaming Development Kit or if you just want to provide feedback to the IIS team, please use this thread.

On September 26th, a new CodeCamp will take place at Buenos Aires. This year, I will join my teammate Diego Poza and together we will talk about how to develop composite applications for WPF & Silverlight using PRISM. Our presentation starts at 4:15 PM and will last 1 hour.

During the presentation we will go over PRISM Core Concepts and show a real-world implementation. Don’t miss the surprises at the end of the session.

On a related topic, Southworks is one of the sponsors of the event and several other southies will be presenting as well:

• Matias and Johnny will be presenting about Mega Datacenters with Windows Azure. Johnny will also join Zaiden and together they will present about VS 2010 and C# 4.0
• Martin Salias will be in functional mode explaining the main advantages of F#.
• Nico Paez will be talking about open source tools for .NET
• Beto, our IT Pro, will be off the charts. He will present in four sessions talking about Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SSME (SCOM, SCVMM, SCDPM).

Are you going to miss this amazing event? Register Now!

Where: Universidad de Palermo, Mario Bravo 1050, Buenos Aires

Time: From 9:30 AM to 19:00 PM

See you in the event and in the Southworks booth.

During the screencast we showed how the user experience can be enhanced by using the new capabilities of the Windows 7 Taskbar.

Thanks to Damian Schenkelman who helped us with the application.

Resources

• Screencast (in Spanish)
• Code
• Windows 7 Screencast – Taskbar, OverlayImage, ProgressBar, Thumbnails
• Developing applications with WPF and Windows 7 (Part I) 

Enjoy!

First, let’s take a look at the Live Smooth Streaming configuration settings window

The main idea here is to read the Live Streaming configuration section and get the attributes values from there. The piece of code looks like:

const string LiveStreamingSectionPath = “system.webServer/media/liveStreaming”;

ServerManager serverManager = new ServerManager();

Configuration configuration = serverManager.GetApplicationHostConfiguration();
ConfigurationSection section = configuration.GetSection(LiveStreamingSectionPath);

if (section != null)
{
    foreach (ConfigurationAttribute attribute in section.Attributes)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(“{0}: {1}”, attribute.Name, attribute.Value);
    }

    Console.ReadLine();
}

Running the preceding code will output the following:

As you see, reading the configuration settings is easy and can enable you different scenarios, for example, deleting the archived streams of a publishing point.
If you want to take a look at the Live Smooth Streaming schema, go to %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\schema and open the IISMedia_LiveStreaming_schema.xml file.

Happy streaming!

One of the things that came up while spiking was finding a way to start, stop & shutdown a publishing point via code.

Microsoft.Web.Administration to the Rescue

With IIS7 a new API to administer IIS from managed code was introduced. This API is really simple to use and with a few lines of code you can manipulate the server configuration as any other information available in IIS7. (if you want to taste the power of this API, I recommend you to read this post from Carlos Aguilar Mares).

So, I used the Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll assembly, that can be found at IIS Directory (%windir%\System32\inetSrv), to perform the operations over the publishing point. But it was not so easy to do it, as there is no information available yet about what RSCA function has to be called  and which parameters need to be used in order get the desired results.

Then, I started to look at the different IIS configuration files (%windir%\System32\inetsrv\config) searching for clues and I came up with the Microsoft.Web.Management.Media.LiveStreaming.dll assembly (this assembly can be found in the GAC after installing the Live Smooth Streaming bits).

In that moment I summoned my best friend Reflector and together went to the depths of this assembly until we found some code that might be useful for our objective.

After doing some tests, I ended up with the following method:

private static void ExecuteRscaFunction(ConfigurationElement workerProcess,

                                        string siteName, string applicationPath,

                                        string fileName, string functionName)
{
    ConfigurationMethod configurationMethod = workerProcess.Methods["GetCustomData"];

    ConfigurationMethodInstance instance = configurationMethod.CreateInstance();
    instance.Input["guidIdOfFunctionCall"] = “Media_LiveStreaming_Control”;

    string currentLogicalPath = applicationPath;

    if (!currentLogicalPath.EndsWith(“/”, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
    {
        currentLogicalPath = currentLogicalPath + “/”;
    }

    string fullPath = string.Concat(currentLogicalPath, fileName);
    string parameters = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, “{0};{1};{2}”,
                                      functionName, siteName, fullPath);
    instance.Input["parametersOfFunctionCall"] = parameters;
    instance.Execute();
}

The most important thing of the method above is the functionName parameter. This parameter can be one the following values depending on what you want to accomplish:

• StartPublishingPoint. This is used to start a publishing point.
• StopPublishingPoint. This is used to stop the live source of the publishing point.
• ShutdownPublishingPoint. This is used to shutdown a publishing point.

To understand where the others parameters should come from, let’s take a look at the following example: So, if we want to the start the LiveSmoothStream publishing point associated to the SmoothStreaming application from the Default Web Site, we should call the ExecuteRscaFunction method in this way:

ExecuteRscaFunction(workerProcess,

                    “Default Web Site”, “/SmoothStreaming”,

                    “LiveSmoothStream.isml”, “StartPublishingPoint”);

The remaining parameter (workerProcess) must be retrieved from the application pool associated to the application.

Note: You can use the Microsoft.Web.Administration API to get all the values previously mentioned.

To see if the function is working you can add the following lines of code at the end of the method to parse the output and print it on the console.

string rawOutput = instance.Output["data"] as string;

byte[] bytes = Convert.FromBase64String(rawOutput);
ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();

Console.WriteLine(encoding.GetString(bytes));

The output after executing the Stop, Shutdown and Start functions:

Hope this helps!. If you want to learn more about Smooth Streaming you might find useful the following links:

• IIS Smooth Streaming Technical Overview
• Smooth Streaming Architecture
• The Birth of Smooth Streaming
• Live Smooth Streaming for IIS 7.0 - Getting Started
• IIS Live Smooth Streaming - Creating and Managing Publishing Points
• Smooth Streaming Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
• I’ve seen the future and the future is… Smooth!
• A Brief History of Multi-Bitrate Streaming

Happy streaming!.

As Erwin said in this post, one of the breaking changes of this new drop is that they removed the .Silverlight and .Desktop extensions from the Assembly names. If you are like me and have more than one solution using Prism v2 with a bunch of projects, you will probably find really annoying going over each project to update the references and the xaml files.

So, in order to accomplish this, I created a Powershell script that will look for all the .csproj and .xaml that contain references to the old prism assemblies and will update it to the new version of them.

Note: If you have your code in TFS, make sure to go offline before running the script, so when you go back online it will detect the changes.

Disclaimer

This code is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Download

You can find the script here.

Hope you find it useful.

During the latest months at Southworks, we have been working on several demos and materials for the Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference 2008.

And in the last two weeks, with Matias and Edgardo, we were in Redmond (Microsoft Corp Main Campus) working hard with the Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) Team on many different projects, all them related to PDC 2008.

Now is time to fly to LA. Matias, Edgardo, Tim, Alex, Johnny, Fede, and myself will be attending one of the biggest events designed for leading-edge developers and software architects.

There are a lot of sessions about many different topics, but the star will be the cloud. Microsoft will be announcing new technologies around the development platform, including the Windows Live Services Platform.

So if you are attending, let’s meet there. For sure that you will find me in the Cloud and Identity sessions.

These are the latest extensions added to the CompositeWPF Contrib community project:

• Window Region Adapter (contributed by Ignacio Baumann Fonay). The Window Region Adapter provides a way to show views in separate windows with a custom style.
  
  For more information about this adapter, see WindowRegionAdapter for CompositeWPF (Prism).
• Composite Extensions for Windows Forms (contributed by Brian Noyes). This extensions allows you to use module loading and events in Windows Form.
  For more information about this extensions, see Composite Extensions for Windows Forms.
• Castle Windsor adapter (contributed by Hadi Eskandari). This adapter allows you to use Castle Windsor as IOC container for your CompositeWPF Applications.
  For more information about this adapter, see Castle Windsor Adapter for Prism.
• Spring.NET adapter (contributed by Willem Meints). This adapter allows you to use Spring.NET as IOC container for your CompositeWPF applications.
  For more information about this adapter, see Using Spring.NET as IOC container for Composite WPF.

Download

You can get these extensions, among others, by downloading latest change set of the CompositeWPF Contrib source control.

Where I can find the documentation of the extensions added to the project?

To check the documentation of the extensions added so far, please visit the Documentation page in the community site.

Enjoy!

• Presentation Model with DataTemplates. Julian Dominguez has been writing about Presentation Model and in his latest post he described how he updated the Commanding QuickStart we shipped in the CompositeWPF June 2008 release to use automatic DataTemplates.
• Disconnected Service Agent (DSA) with CompositeWPF. This sample created by Mariano Converti and Damian Schenkelman demonstrate how to use the Disconnected Service Agent (DSA) with CompositeWPF. For more information about this sample, see How-to: Use the Disconnected Service Agent (DSA) with CompositeWPF (Prism).
• DialogWorkspace sample. In this sample you will find how to use the Dialog Workspace created by Willem Meints
• CAB WPF QuickStart migrated to CompositeWPF. In my previous post, I announced the release of a new guidance to help CAB developers familiarize themselves with the Composite Application Guidance. This sample created by Ignacio Baumann Fonay, Ezequiel Sculli and Mariano Converti, shows how to migrate from CAB to CompositeWPF. (the application selected was the WPF QuickStart included in the SCSF source code). I recommend you to read also the documentation, because explains how the migration was performed. For more information see WPF Quickstart (shipped with SCSF) regenerated using Composite WPF (Prism).

Download

You can get these samples, among others extensions, by downloading latest change set of the CompositeWPF Contrib source control.

Coming soon

Some people has been asking for an OutlookBar sample. The good news is that Damian Schenkelman and me are working on it, so stay tuned, we will publish it soon.

Let’s take a look at the guidance content index:

Because the Composite UI Application Block and the Composite Application Guidance are targeted to build composite applications, they have similar core concepts. These core concepts have different implementations. The following figure compares the implementation of the core concepts.
 

Want more?

Download the Composite Application Guidance for Composite UI Application Block Developers from Codeplex.

Feedback

We really want your feedback on this guidance, so feel free to give us your feedback on the discussion board.

Enjoy!