Brian Goldfarb's Blog

earlier this week, as part of MIX09, we launched an official Silverlight team blog.   Subscribe now!  We’ll push out new technical content, videos, and use it as a venue to respond to critical industry events that require our voice.  You can use it as a direct conduit to us and the team with feedback (both good and bad!).

We’ll cover our entire UX platform including Expression Studio with a focus on  Expression Blend (and the newly announced SkethFlow functionality which has had rave reviews), Silverlight, Visual Studio, and anything else we think is important.

Spread the news – http://team.silverlight.net/

I kicked us off with this post:  http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/introducing-the-new-silverlight-blog/

MIX is here, I hop on a plane to vegas in 16 hours.  See you there – it is going to be *awesome*

As a huge Duke Basketball fan this win is particularly gratifying :)  a few great articles below

http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/article/61563

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/silverlight-to-power-2009-ncaa-march-madness.ars

http://search.live.com/news/results.aspx?q=silverlight+cbs&form=QBNR

Application Request Routing (ARR) v1 released today! The ARR feature is a free IIS7 extension that extends the Web server UI and runtime to:

· Achieve high availability and scalability.

· Enable elastic scalability for shared hosters.

· Dynamically load balance web requests (to be used in conjunction with existing load balancers)

ARR enables the following scenarios

· Easily add server capacity as the demand for their web application increases 

· Seamlessly deploy or upgrade web applications without downtime

· Shared hosters can offer elastic scalability and change the business model based on resource consumption

More details at http://www.iis.net/extensions/ApplicationRequestRouting

MIX09 is going to be amazing.  I can’t give away the details, but as the keynote owner for Scott Guthrie (as I have been every year, it’s a glorious job to be the man behind the curtain :)) and I can tell you this year is on track to be the best ever.

We will be bringing to market some amazing technology, setting the stage for the future of our Web and RIA technologies, showing off the great work of many of our amazing partners, and so much more.   I know times are tough, but if you can swing it or tell a friend do it.

To help with costs, 3rd night’s on us now :)

http://visitmix.com/News/Free-Third-Night-at-The-Venetian

Let me know if you have any questions!  or feedback on what you want to see in the day 1 keynote :)

I'm going to blatantly steal Bill Staples words since they were so good :)

"I’m excited to announce the availability of the Release Candidate version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI). 

Web PI is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server, along with a lot of cool IIS extensions like URL rewrite and ASP.NET MVC.

Web PI offers a simple experience for downloading and installing the entire stack through a single installer to help you obtain the software you need to build and run a complete Web solution on the Microsoft Web platform, whether you are using Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008.

Run Web PI to get started and then run it again anytime to check for new extensions to the platform.  Every time Web PI is run it checks online to ensure the most current versions and new additions to the Microsoft Web Platform are downloaded.  Give Web PI a try today!"

I just heard some great news from Europe: MSN Germany received the “IPTV Award 2008” for technical innovation for their brand new Social Video Mashup MSN ClipClub TV. The solution was built by Axinom, a German Microsoft partner. 

In a highly competitive environment, where there are strong video, social, and chat options, MSN created a solution that combines different products: Clip Club TV connects existing MSN video content to the functionality of Windows Live Messenger in an innovative Silverlight 2 interface - this is the first Live Messenger UI built with Silverlight 2 that I'm aware of. Combined technologies and services are worth more than the sum of their parts.

http://clipclub.video.msn.de

“IPTV Award 2008” competition is huge and one of the most prestigious IPTV awards in Europe sponsored by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as well as the IPTV Forum and, among others, Deutsche Bank and Universal Publishing.

Almost 200 entries have been invited for the: promising business models, outstanding creativity and design, exciting content, innovative technology and audience award in cooperation with one of Germanys largest TV Guides ‘TV Movie’.

Congrats to MSN, ClipClub TV and Axiom for winning and being part of a pretty elite group of folks!

My team pulled this together, help them pick your brain!

Give us feedback on Silverlight 2

We’ve put together a short survey to help us improve our Silverlight features and API. Spend 15 minutes and tell us what is good and bad about Silverlight so far.

We've done some amazing work with Expression Blend 2 for designers and now with the final release of Silverlight 2 you can really see how it all comes together.  I was talking with Celso Gomes and Peter Blois a few weeks ago about how we could demonstrate this and it culminated in a great video and blog post that Scott Guthrie just put up.

Check it out here and let me know what you think!

I'm speaking at >Play this year.  The show actually started earlier this morning, but heading over in the afternoon.  If you are around, say hello :) Should be a fun one!

http://www.iis.net/extensions

The team just launched a new redesigned extensions page to make it even easier to find all the great out of band features you can get and install into IIS7.  The newest downloads are URL Rewrite Module, Microsoft Web Deployment Tool, Application Request Routing

Other Highlights include:

• FTP Publishing Service, WEBDav Support
• Windows Media Services, Bit Rate Throttling, and Web Playlists
• URL Rewrite Module
• App Request Routing
• URLScan

and more!

check it out.

I have been exchanging mail with Bill Konrad about how we can improve the Facebook Developer Toolkit work that we put together.  It's been a popular, skunkworks project to help make it easier to target Facebook development using .NET.

He put together this awesome article on how to get started:

http://devtacular.com/articles/bkonrad/how-to-use-the-facebook-developer-toolkit-20/

The great aspect of this project is that it's under our OSI Approved MS-PL license.  So get involved, help make it better. 

Today, we announced BizSpark, a global program designed to help accelerate the success of early stage software Startups.  This is an awesome program that is really going to change the way startups evaluate technology usage.  Choosing Microsoft, not only gets you best of breed technology solutions, but now marketing, demand generation, support, and more!    The net cool thing here is a startup can build a killer software app in the cloud and money off it for 3 years for $100 -- pretty sweet.

By joining BizSpark, Startups get:

• Software:  fast and easy access to Microsoft’s current full-featured development tools, platform technologies, and unlimited production licenses of server products for immediate use in developing and bringing to market innovative and interoperable solutions with no upfront costs and minimal requirements. Startups will also get access to the community technology preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Azure Services Platform.
  
• Support:  professional technical support from Microsoft (MSDN) and community support from BizSpark Network Partners around the world who provide a wide range of support resources for software startups.  Network Partners are incubators, investors, advisors, government agencies and hosters who are vested in software-fueled innovation and entrepreneurship.
  
• Visibility:  a dedicated online startup directory, BizSparkDB, on the Microsoft  Startup Zone website (www.microsoftstartupzone.com) where we will highlight  promising companies from around the world, including the “BizSpark Startup of the Day”. Through their relationship with Microsoft and BizSpark Network Partners, startups will achieve global visibility to an audience of potential investors, clients and partners.

Plus, there is no up-front cost and no commitment (leave whenever you want).  At the end (after 3 years), you pay $100.  Yea that's it. 

We've also lined up hosters like goGrid, Rackspace, or Opsource to help get you started.

If you want in, startup can get access to BizSpark either through a Network Partner (e.g. TiE, NVCA, select Venture Capitalists, and over 300+ entrepreneurial-focused organizations with a strong track record to helping young and promising technology companies success  or through Microsoft BizSpark Program Leads (called “BizSpark Champs”). Startups can find both at Microsoft.com/bizspark.

Partners like TechStars, KPCB, Angel Capital Association or the European Business Angel Network are on board with us.

Eligibility for the program

BizSpark is available to startups that fit the following criteria, nominated by Network Partners or MSFTEES:

• A private company building a software-based product or service
• In business for less than 3 years
• Less than USD $1M in revenue (2-4 local variants exist)
• Participation lasts up to three years

Availability:

• BizSpark is immediately available worldwide in most countries
• 82 countries have a BizSpark Program Lead (“BizSpark Champs”) to provide support

Offering Details:

Please visit www.microsoftstartupzone.com/bizspark  for detailed program information.

Spread the word (I'm becoming a champ too so I can help)

If you watch MSNBC and have ever seen Chuck Todd of MSNBC and his Surface applications for predicting the US Presidential Elections and wished you could do the same thing?  Well now you can, with this awesome new application from MSNBC (built with .NET using WPF).  You can download it here and run it to make your own predictions, compare it with the official ones.

On Tuesday last week we announced a partnership with Akamai to deliver a solution for some of the most amazing video solution son the Web.

Silverlight was designed to provide built-in support for Adaptive Streaming solutions and is fully extensible so that anyone can build their own custom implementation.  For example, MOVE networks is using this model, using their own custom Adaptive Streaming solution with Silverlight as a delivery/front-end experience.  A fine choice.

We are also providing a fully featured, built-in, Adaptive Streaming solution based on our best of breed Windows Server and IIS technologies.

IIS Smooth Streaming is a free feature of IIS that when coupled with a Silverlight player will provide an amazing Adaptive Streaming experience.  http://www.smoothhd.com/ is our joint example site which is front-ended with a silverlight application and backended with IIS Smooth Streaming. 

I'll tell you what, the quality blew me away.

We are also improving our Expression tools to make it easy for anyone to take a media file and create the files that IIS Smooth Streaming will support so you can take advantage of it.

Or better yet, Akamai is going to launcha service to just take care of all the hard work for you.

cool stuff!

Read more:

NYTIMES: Microsoft, Akamai team up for 'no-buffer' video streaming

Our press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-28AdaptiveStreamingPR.mspx