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News from Mix 2009 – Day 2

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Internet Explorer 8 and Industrial Design

The keynote today was all about Internet Explorer 8 and a wonderful piece on industrial design by Deborah Adler talking about the prescription drug container she designed for Target.

Get Internet Explorer for your computer today and the great video on internet history for yourself! :)

Also make sure not to miss the awesome Internet Explorer 8 add-ons written by the Swiss Ricardo.ch, Local.ch and Tilllate.ch that you can find up on https://www.microsoft.ch/ie8. More Web slices, accelerators and visual search providers can be found on https://ieaddons.com.

Expression Blend 3

I learned a few more, interesting facts about Blend 3 today.

By creating a SketchFlow project, Blend adds all components that make up the Silverlight 3 based SketchFlow player to the project. So by hitting “F5” on a SketchFlow project, the player shows up immediately, letting you browse the sketched site. The project can therefore be hosted on a web server to allow a client to browse the prototype remotely and add annotations.

Annotations get saved as files through the SketchFlow player and can be emailed back to the developer. He then opens them in Expression Blend 3 and gets a special UI to review all the feedback, comments and annotations from the reviewer.

The SketchFlow player has a control that lets you navigate the entire site, even if the pages are not connected yet. Each page or “screen” can be treated as a whiteboard and Expression Blend 3 really allows you to draw and scribble your ideas on it very effectively and quickly.

Each solution consists of a number of “screens” connected through the “Flow” that contain various “states”. The “state” is like a storyboard of something that would happen when the user interacts with a screen. This can be an animation, an event on a control, anything.

The state model known from Expression Blend 2 is used for modeling these states – very transparently.

One more thing that impressed me was a demo that imported a Photoshop graphic in Expression Blend 3. Expression retains all the “layers” in the Photoshop graphic and the designer/developer, using Blend 3, can now select some of these layers and convert them into any control – for example a slider control.

After a quick assignment of which of the selected elements takes on which function of the control (for example the Thumb button on the slider control), Expression Blend automatically creates a working new control (I suppose it’s a template for the regular, assigned control).

All of these features will be working in Silverlight- and in WPF-projects. Unfortunately, the currently available Blend 3 CTP does not contain these SketchFlow – Features yet.

Smooth Streaming in Internet Information Server 7

I also looked at Smooth Streaming in more detail today. So how does it work exactly?

The client sends an HTTP request to the server, requesting a “fragment” of a video (usually, a fragment is 2 seconds long) in a specific bitrate. The first, requested fragment is always requested in very low bitrate to allow VERY fast buffering and playing.

The server sends this fragment back to the client over normal HTTP.

The client plays this fragment to the user and requests the next fragment:

  • If download was very quick and PC is not under load in a higher bitrate.
  • If Internet connectivity is bad or PC is too busy to play the video in the high bitrate, it requests it in a lower bitrate format.

This is repeated for as long as the video plays. So practically, the video quality (bitrate) can chance after each fragment, based on current bandwidth and PC load.

If the user skips to a certain point in the video. The according fragments are requested, again at a very low bitrate to allow for fast buffering and playback start.

The client knows what bitrate versions of the stream are available through a “manifest” file – an XML file with a “.ism” extension that contains a list of all fragments in all available bitrates for video and for audio! There can be various versions of the video and audio not just at various bitrates but also in various languages (audio) or with subtitles (video).

One very cool side-effect of this is that these fragments sent through HTTP can be cached by regular edge-servers! So it’s like streaming video cacheable on regular proxies!

Smooth Streaming can VERY easily be set up using the new IIS Media Services 3 – currently in beta and downloadable via https://iis.net/media.

I also learned quite a lot on ASP.NET AJAX 4 but I am saving this for my speech on this subject at TechDays in April in Geneva and Berne! :)

Final thoughts

Silverlight sessions were all very packed today, so packed actually that I couldn’t attend one because the session room was completely full. People seem to be very happy with what Silverlight 3 has to offer.

I met Rick Casey from Alabama who told me that he has been a reader of our team-blog for quite some time and that he likes our posts and screencasts. One more reason to write in English here! Hello Rick! :D

That’s all for today – see you tomorrow for the final day @Mix09!

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