Invite2Messenger has come to Canada!

What is it?

A portal that allows users to access all their contact lists from different social networking sites, and invite them to join Messenger or add them to their contact lists.  You can try it out today at http://www.invite2messenger.net .  Currently we support Facebook only, but our plan is to expand this list to Hotmail, bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Tagged. 

Sample Invitation

Start inviting! :)

OK I haven't been slacking off.  I forgot to charge my laptop last night and I couldn't blog during the session.

Encoder V2

One of the sessions I really looked forward to.  I've been playing with Encoder during V1 and found it really cooler, in fact, much cooler than blend / designer mostly due to the fact that it provides a lot of out of the box video encoding capabilities.  I got some sneak peek of Encoder V2 through various sessions yesterday but today I got a much more indepth discussion only focused on Encoder.

Update since V2:

Partial rebuild.  One big problem in V1 is that the re-encoding process may take a long time.  This is very bad especially when you only changed a really small thing and watched Encoder to recompress everything.  Now this is improved such that only the thing you changed is being recompressed.  If you only change, say the header / meta data, you won't need to recompile at all, neat!

Script Command.  This was briefly discussed is the previous sessions as well.  But this session really showcased the power of script command.  From providing closed caption to breaking chapters, all the way to firing up advanced Silverlight Controls (like the interactive polls in the demo), all of these could be controlled through script commands. 

Templates.  More advanced template editing.  Direct hook up with Blend to allow easy editing of templates.  Encoder will also ship some SL2 templates when SL2 becomes officially available.

Developing Rich Application with IE 8

More and more IE8 sessions :) 

First, IE 7 vs IE 8 performance, not only we increased the number of parallel connections, the parsing won't be stopped by script tags anymore.

Second, dev tools.  I talked a lot about it yesterday so I'm not going to reiterate.  One thing though is that debugging is associated with each tab / session, not with the entire IE8.  Not sure if this is big for you but this is certainly very big for me. 

Thirdly, HTML5 and DOM Storage,

-Connection Event fired up by IE [Event is raised whenever IE8 cannot get pass proxy]

-Asynchronous r/w access to local DOM storage.  Each domain has 10MB and no public storage.  this is a simple key-value pair in a local file but there's no limit in each key-value pair.

Fourth, XDR (cross domain request) and XDM (cross document messaging)

Last but not least ARIA, Accessible Rich Internet Application.

this is the least known to me in all the topics.  Basically from how I understand it it is a standard to mark up your webpage to enhance accessibility such as Screen Reader and other tools.  this is a new standard specifically focused on dynamic and scripted web content.

I can't bring myself to make notes of it.  Watch it yourself NOW.

Integrating Silverlight with Media files

This track goes in depth on some features in SL2 and Expression Encoder beta 2.  A few things that really amazed me is the seamless integration between streaming online media and playing local media files within one single app.  The second part that I find extremely interesting is the support of PlayReady.  there are also more information about IIS7 bitrate throttling and webplaylist.  If you are interested, read on.

IIS 7 Media Pack Highlights

Bitrate throttling - control how much of the media is sent to clients.  Burst of content is sent in the initial load times but subsequent content will be sent at a much lower bitrate.  This is great to save server bandwidth because statistically most people only watch the 20% of the content before the close the video.  (Don't ask me about the validity of the stat), so server doesn't need to send all these unseen data wasting bandwith.

Web playlist - Client side playlist with server-side state.  Client cannot alter state.  Client seek or skip entry.  This is very useful when you want to stream pre-rolls or advertising within you video..

Now we are onto ads, Silverlight, when combined with Encoder, actually supports ad targetting as well.  Keying on the sessionID, servers can server different prerolls or ads based on the different videos being played.  Not fancy enough?  It is also possible to targetting to a specific set of frames within a video using Expression Encoder 2 and the marker feature.  Server can associate metadata with a particular frame implement script commands.  Script command is just 3 string values :Time, Type and Command.  The Type and Command is a key value pair that client can read fro the video and fire off an event.  using myMediaElenect.MarkerReached  listener, and can check Type.and Text from the marker. 

In terms of PlayReady , online playback can be DRMed (PlayReady).  server can send a marker to client indicating the file needs a license, and client will contact license erver and exchange key.  If it is licensed the video will play.  Silverlight 2 doesn't support any offline DRM media request.

Coming up... Creating Rich, Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2 Controls

1:00 PM IE8 Track

This IE 8 track goes much more in-depth about the new features in IE8 in addition to the key note session.  Some areas include:

Zoom capabilities: IE8 can zoom in to a webpage but at the same time keep the layout unchanged.  (i.e. IE 8 relayout the entire page on the fly)  For instance, even after you zoomed in 4X, you will still see the entire page and not section of the page. 

Activities: Webpage can configure something called "activities".  Basically that's a subset of the webpage that people can add it to their IE8 "toolbar" on the top and get instant access to it from any website.  On the surface it looks like a quick link, but underneath the cover activities enable much more than that:  One example is that there will be a contextual hook up when users right click on a particular content on another webpage.  For instance, if you have setup a mapping service in your website as an activity, when a user go to another webpage, right click on an address, he / she could directly send that address to your mapping service and bring back the result in a small preview window. 

Webslices: They are markup section of the webpage that contains dynamic information.  When a user subscribe to the update for webslices, he / she will be able to look at the content dynamically from the toolbar on demand.  It is done through hAtom

Compliances: CSS 2.1 compliant plus Box-sizing and vertical text support.  Moreover, developers can choose to display their website using full CSS compliant mode or IE 7 mode (to keep backward compatibility).

Dev tools in the box: Dev tools shipped within every copy of IE8, with real time debugging tool for CSS, HTML and JavaScript.  The idea is not to replace your existing debugging tool but allows you to go to any computer running IE8 and do debugging on the fly - complement your existing tools.

Performance - Increased parallel connection limit to 6 for broadband and 2 to narrow band.  There's also a huge performance increase in Jscript engine with notable increase in strings operations, function calls, etc. More importantly, IE8 supports HTML5 storage interface, and we implemented 2: Sessionstore (Tab/session specific) and LocalStore (Shared).  Websites can store 10MB / Domain for key/value pairs.

3:00pm Windows Live Sessions

This session was dedicated to Windows Live Platform and delivered by Angus Logan.  This gives an overview on WLP progresses since MIX07 when we first announced it, and also some hands on, technical walk through on how to integrate WLP into your site.  Strongly recommend you to look at the recording when it becomes available.

The first part of the presentation was from Coca Cola on a campaign that they will run with Messenger team for EURO 2008 Soccer in May 2008: euro2008album.com.  It looks fun, and I may steal that idea and run it in Canada :)

Since MIX 07:

Alpha to Beta:  Live Contacts API, Silverlight Streaming

Messenger Control Beta: IM Control, IM Presence, Messenger Library

CTP: Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio, Photo API, Application Based Storage

Standardization: AtomPub, WL ID delegated Authenticated model

Other nuggets: Current Windows Live Sign in integration takes users away from 3d party site and show them the WL branded sign in screen, that screen would be customizable in the future and could be branded under 3rd party styles.

Updates to WL Streaming:

Transcode in the sky: users can now upload videos of different types (such as .MOV, MPG) without using expression encoder.  The video will be uploaded to the cloud and will be encoded automatically.  [Very neat].  Users are entitled to 10GB of data and up to 5Tb of streaming a month with max bitrate of 1400kpbs

9:30am  - Ray Ozzie key note  - watch it live here.

9:56am - IE 8 announcement!!

IE 8.0:

- CSS 2.1 - our core approach to interopability

- CSS Certification

- performance - 2.5 times performance improvement in major benchmarks.

- HTML 5 - improvement of usability, connection event, HTML 5 DOM storage to save content locally. 

- New set of dev tools

- Activities and Web slices - eBay, Facebook demos.  You need to see the demo yourself.  I promise your time won't be wasted.

Beta 1 for developer is available now! http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8/

10:20: Silverlight 2.0 annoucement

- Silverlight reaches 1.5M install each day

- Improved HD video, TCO and monetization support, adaptive streaming [natively supported, client side to pick appropriate bitrate and encoding real time.

- IIS 7 - allow variable bitrate streaming [ progressive download into client machine ]

- Silverlight advertising template for VS 2008.  [Supports tracking natively],

- Video.show - free download through codeplex - demo that deploys Silverlight ads to web with tracking enabled.

- Silverlight 2 beta 1 available for download!  http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

10:40: DoubleClick with Silverlight

- DoubleClick instream product supports Silverlight 2.0!

- DoubleClick instream products allows tracking of video events (pause, stop, loaded, etc...) within Silverlight 2.0 apps.

- DoubleClick SDK will be available sometime in Q2.

10:46 NBC Olympics Site Preview

- 2200 hours for 17 days live and also VOD - who can do that? Of course, Silverlight :)

- Directly connected with Data, expert commentaries.

- Rewind and review video in real time, and even PIP.

- Community aspects: real time sharing, community most popular videos.

11:01 Announcing more [and more]* Silverlight Controls

- Provide high level controls like slider, calendar and other under open source license.  Use it, ship it, deploy it, do anything with it.  It also support full customization (CSS).

- Full intellisense and debugging support

- Final beta 1 build for Expression available today

11:04 AOL mail client using Silverlight

- Silverlight - need faster app than DHTML + AJAX!  And Silverlight nailed it over DHTML + AJAX.

- Personalization - Full skinning capabilities using Silverlight for the mail client. Protected isolated storage - much better/faster than browser cache.

11:10 Hardrock Cafe using Silverlight

- 2 billion pixels of image data.  Silverlight allows zooming in and out in a breeze.

- Super quick processing.- sorting and searching for images super, super quick.

Will be live this week, http://www.hardrock.com, make sure to check it out then!

11:17 Aston Martin Silverlight Integration

- Full 3D render model with 18G worths of pictures.

- Video content all embedded directly within control.

11:30 Cirque du Soleil and Silverlight

- Mash frontend up for database (textual, videos and metadata).

- Online and Offline integration is key  Synchronization provided by Silverlight (offline / online) is invisible to users.

11:40 Silverlight going into Mobile!

- Same tools, same code, and deployed to mobile as in PC.-Windows Mobile / non- WM devices.  Nokia will deliver Silverlight in their new product line including S60. Internet tablets, 40 series, etc.

demo - MIXER from Stimulant using Silverlight.

demo - Silverlight App on Nokia S60 from WeatherBug: http://silverlight.weatherbug.com

Finally, that's the end of the very first morning session. Stay tuned for the afternoon tracks.

Has been a year since I was last in Vegas.  21 deg Celsius, can't ask for a better time to be in Vegas.

Registration @ MIX - It's 2:00pm in Vegas and not a lot of people arrived yet.  I got my pass in 10 minutes, a huge improvement from last year's 30 minutes.

The goodies bag from registration..

This is the room where Ray Ozzie will give his key note tomorrow.

Rock band tournament tomorrow!  Nah, I won't be joining. 

The Sandbox is open today all day (well, 4 - 8).

Finally, I got to see Surface in action.. It definitely is the hottest section in the whole sandbox.

This is not a fancy product announcement but many people don't know this.  A good portion of my day is to evangelize our products, and a lot of times that include answering customer questions and addressing concerns.  A lot of times I receive questions like,

"How do I reset my Hotmail password"

"I forgot my password!"

"My friend got accessed to my account and changed my password!"

"Someone got accessed to my account and sending out random emails!"

"I can't view Hotmail from my browser / computer"

And these folks are panicking and they don't know what to do!  The lucky ones may know someone in MS or somehow found the feedback channel on Sympatico / MSN website and eventually get to one of us.  But a much better, well-supported way exists: http://support.live.com.

Any users (free or paid) users can log a support request at the above mentioned site free of charge, and a representative will contact your via email in a few days to help you out no matter what problem you have.  I'm not saying these reps could help you with *anything*, but they are equipped with all the tools and knowledge that cover most of the common problems like what I mentioned above.  All support tickets are tracked and monitored and we do reply to all of them.  I've often received complaints that the end users did not receive a response, but most of the times that's because they either overlooked the response or the email was trapped in the junk mail folder.

But seriously, the support team responds to each and every of them and they are not automated response :)  Most importantly, they are good.

The call to action here is to spread the words! :)  I know a lot of you reading this post are the tech support in your family / social circle.  Please! let them know that free support exists in Windows Live services and make use of them!