Here is a great opportunity to learn more about Silverlight. A FULL day FREE Fire Starter Event on Silverlight on 2nd Dec 2010. Great news is that the event is streamed online so you can watch from anywhere in the world. Register for the event here.
Our Blog is Down Due to DDOS Attack
For the last couple of days, you may be experiencing intermittent problems in accessing our blog as the servers hosted with SiteGround are under DDOS attack.
Hopefully it will be clear soon.
Microsoft PDC 2010 : Video RSS Feeds
Microsoft’s Developer eco-system is arguably one of the best and probably lot more active than others out there. And the eco-system produces tons of multi-media content. But I always cringe when I don’t see an RSS Feed with Media Enclosures that users can readily subscribe and watch or download instantly. Its always left to somebody to help us out.
PDC 2010 web site is a nice Silverlight application. And absolutely no HTML fall back incase somebody doesn’t have a Silverlight plugin installed. And of course, no RSS Feed (yet) as usual.
Thanks a ton to Greg Duncan for providing a full list of Videos (with all formats available) and associated RSS Feeds that you can readily subscribe. Visit his blog post and access either the individual list or RSS Feeds of your favorite formats here.
If you want to watch those Videos on your iPad or iPhone, try MP4(low) format.
Active Player
If you don’t have a Media Player or Application that can consume those RSS Feeds and instantly playback, take a look at Active Player. Not only it help you subscribe to RSS Feeds, it also let you take notes, bookmark those videos or even create clips of those videos for sharing or review later. Here is a snapshot of the Active Player playing a Video from PDC2010 feed.
Active Feeds : Create an RSS Feed of your Favorite Videos
I built a small Google App Engine app, called Active Feeds recently to create your own RSS Feed from videos from anywhere on the web and share with the world. I quickly built a set of RSS Feeds for Videos available at ASP.NET to demonstrate. Next time, if you want to create an RSS Feed with your favorite Videos, check it out. The application needs lots of work to make it more user friendly but as of now is fully functional to use.
Free E-Book : Programming Windows Phone 7
If you are tinkering on developing .NET Applications on Windows Mobile 7, here is a free eBook from Microsoft Press by Charles Petzold, that can get you started. The book is available in PDF and XPS formats.
Some more free e-Books for .NET Developers moving to VS 2010 here.
Designs Apart : Groupon’s Unsubscribe Screen
Groupon‘s Unsubscribe screen asks you to ‘Punish’ a team member that recommended Email Subscriptions whenever you unsubscribe to those Email notifications.
Nice, personal, playful and bring you back to interacting with their site, even after you decided to go away. Loved it.