It has gone in a blur but it was exactly one year ago I was awarded an MVP for my community service to Windows Live Developers. Always fun to be awarded on April Fools Day. The name has changed, I'm now a Windows Live Platform MVP.

Since then we have had several releases of Virtual Earth (and PetaBytes of new data), a VE exam released, QuickApps with sample code to learn from, ASP.NET 3.5 controls and many a name change. 

I kept busy building the http://viawindowslive.com community site that so many of you have now contributed to with fellow MVP Bronwen Zande. We presented at various events in Australia, recently we travelled around Australia presenting 9 session on Virtual Earth and SQL 2008 Spatial. I took on the role of Moderator for the Read More »

After touring the country, this week we are visiting the Brisbane SQL User Group to give our presentation on SQL 2008 Spatial and Virtual Earth.  This is our 9th and final performance of this talk around Australia. Make sure you pay attention as we have some questions at the end to give our some swag.

Location Details: Microsoft Brisbane Office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle Street

Start Time: 6pm

Registration HERE

SQL Spatial with Virtual Earth

In t ... Read More »

Have had "fun" with the SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayerl today..haven't found the solution..just all the symptoms.

So i've got a SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer, I've set it to point to an application on Silverlight Streaming, with autoplay OFF so it doesn't start playing as soon as you load the page...all works well.

Then I added a GridView which displayed thumbnails of all the videos I want to play, and when the user clicks on one i update the video and play it using the following javascript:

        function updatevideo(url)
    {
        var slMediaPlayer = $find("<%=CurrentSilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer.ClientID %>");
        slMediaPlayer.set_mediaSource(url);
        slMediaPlayer.set_autoPlay(true);
        return false;
    }

This also works ... Read More »

This month's CoDe Focus magazine was an issue all about Windows Live.  It's a great resource for Windows Live information with articles in Virtual Earth, Messenger, Live Search, Live ID, Quick Apps etc.

John and I made an appearance in the addition.  Our articles can be found here:

• Virtual Earth - What's new in the latest release
• Introduction to the Live Search API

This week we are visiting the Gold Coast .Net User Group to give our presentation on SQL 2008 Spatial and Virtual Earth.

Location Details: Bond University, Theatre 3 (Building 6 Level 3 Room 29)

Start Time: 6pm

SQL Spatial with Virtual Earth

In this visually interactive talk we explore the new spatial data types, functions and indexes directly related to the real world using the interactive browser based Virtual Earth control. We focus on the new Geography data type providing an overview of the new functionality as directly applied to mapping. This includes the storage of points, polylines and polygons as well as real world tasks like effective rendering to the map, geofencing and proximity searches. We explore the power of union and ... Read More »

I had someone read my Live Alert article today and ask me where to get the webservice from.  They are listed here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb259725.aspx

Message: http://services.alerts.live.com/axis/services/Message?wsdl

Subscription: http://services.alerts.live.com/axis/services/Subscription?wsdl Read More »

I wanted to play with the Silverlight Streaming Server control that's part of the Live Tools for Visual Studio.

When i went to run my application I got the following error:

Sys.InvalidOperationExceptoin: DownloaError error#1001 in control 'SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer1': AG_E_UNKNOWN_ERROR

I tried both the Dec CTP and the Feb CTP with the same error.  Turns out you can't use a videos that were uploaded using the new "Manage Video" option, only applications.

So I've switched back to using videos uploaded as applications and it works a treat :)

I downloaded the newExpression Encoder 2 Beta so I could encode some videos for Silverlight Streaming today and noticed a few differences.

I did notice a change to the output aswell which will affect the manifest.xml file.  I used to have a BasePlayer.js file but the new version outputs ExpressionPlayer.js instead.

There's a few cool options around playback parameters so you can control whether to play back automatically etc. Check out the rest of the new feature ... Read More »

For those who've read my tweets lately, I've spent a bit of time on the mix site watching videos of the sessions..very addictive by the way.  Also came across the list of worldwide ReMix events here: http://www.visitmix.com/2008/Worldwide/

Good news for Australia, is it looks like there will be 2 events on the week starting th 19th May, in Melbourne and Sydney.

Now to decide which one to go to :)

If you've been using the Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio, the February 2008 CTP has been released.  See the notes here: https://connect.microsoft.com/content/content.aspx?ContentID=7901&SiteID=505&wa=wsignin1.0

So what's different?

• Messenger Chat Control has been added
• Depenency on ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions has been REMOVED.
• CTP is compatible with Silverlight 2.0 SDK

The site is context sensitive so click on Downloads to get the list of builds available for download or go here: https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloa ... Read More »