Angus Logan on Windows Live

Angus Logan from the Windows Live team shares his thoughts on the evolution of Windows Live and Windows Live services, social networking, Live Mesh, and what it all means for developers.

TechEd: Angus Logan on Windows Live

Video.Show - Creating your own YouTube-style site

Video.Show is a reference-quality blueprint for implementing a user-generated video content site. It provides everything you need to create a website for uploading, encoding, cataloguing, publishing and commenting on videos, using Silverlight, Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live.

Setting up your own video community website can be a real headache. There's a lot to worry about: disk space, bandwidth, video formats and encoding...

Video.Show does all of the hard work for you. The key is Silverlight technology paired up with Silverlight Streaming's free, world class content hosting. Video.Show provides Silverlight video controls, Silverlight Streaming hosting integration, leveraging Expression Encoder's ability to handle most popular video formats so you can be uploading videos within minutes.

Few months back Tim Sneath had announced about the final version of Video.Show, a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! Following is the part of the announcement he made:

You might be interested in Video.Show if:

• Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or external access;
• You're creating the next YouTube-style site and you want somewhere to start;
• You want to share home movies with your family and friends via your own personal site, rather than uploading them to somewhere public like YouTube or MSN Soapbox;
• You're running a conference or event and you want to make the materials available for anyone else to watch;
• You're a hosting provider and you want to offer your customers a way to store and share videos;
• You simply want to learn how to build a great AJAX web site experience with Microsoft technologies.

Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005 Express and Expression Encoder; the software is built to guide you through a few simple configuration steps (setting an admin password and obtaining a Silverlight Streaming key), and then you're up and running

He also gives one of his favorite real-world practical implementations of Video.Show example as filmsforlearning.org, a UK-based education site for students and teachers.Since the release of Video.Show there have been many thousands of downloads.

For more details check the codeplex link and Tims Sneath Blog post.

Also check this link for demonstrating the experience for a user without Silverlight installed.

Video.Show is a Microsoft Software-plus-Services Blueprint. Software-plus-Services Blueprints are a series of open source frameworks and workflow-based guidance packages designed to provide an architectural bridge and reduce the friction you experience building real-world Software-plus-Services applications. The source code can be downloaded from codeplex.

Windows Live Quick Applications Image Banner

As you can see, I have put an image on the sidebar saying "Free Source Code", Its an image banner link for Quick Apps

As you all must be knowing, Windows Live Quick Applications provide customizable out-of-the box solutions for specific Web scenarios. Each Quick App is built on Windows Live services and is offered as a source code download for you to use today.

And recently Tafiti source code was released as Quick Apps.

So if you also want to put the banner on your Blog, spreading the word about Quick Apps, just copy and paste the following code into your blog or site.

<a href="http://dev.live.com/quickapps"><img src="http://dev.live.com/img/quickappsBanner.jpg" border="0"></a>

I got this from Get your source code here!

Source code for Tafiti released

Microsoft had earlier released Tafiti, a search front-end,which uses Silverlight and Live Search and gives a richer experience in search. Check more details here: Microsoft Tafiti - Silverlight based search front end

Today, Windows Live Platform team released the Tafiti Search Visualization source code to CodePlex, which means any developer can download, modify, and resell the code (see MS-PL License for all the details).

So get your hands on the source code and find out what's in the code that combines Silverlight and Windows Live Services. A very good move to provide the source code. You can also find earlier released more of such source codes in the CodePlex as QuickApps. Windows Live Quick Applications are a set of working applications developers can download and use as reference implementations or starter kits for the Windows Live Platform.

More details here: ANNOUNCEMENT: Tafiti Search Visualization Quick App

Angus Logan in his blog had already given a hint few days back, New Quick App coming in a couple of days but had not revealed what it was.