After three public preview releases, I’m proud to announce the final version of Video.Show, a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web!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.

We built Video.Show to enable all the above scenarios and many more!

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. The application is broadly licensed for commercial or non-commercial purposes and full source code is available for review or modification.

For an end-user, we’ve designed Video.Show to be straightforward to use, both for uploading new videos and for browsing existing videos. The very first thing you’ll see when you visit a Video.Show-based site is the “video wall”, which is designed to let you browse through video thumbnails without having to navigate from page to page. You can hover over any thumbnail to see a short preview of the video, or click on it to play the video in a full-size view. One nice touch is the way that the rest of the interface fades down when you play a video - this was designed to subtly imitate the way that movie theaters fade the lights when the show starts. As you’re watching a video, you can add comments; but unlike typical sites where the comments stand alone, with Video.Show they are triggered by marker points during the video so you can connect the comment to a specific scene.

From a developer perspective, Video.Show was designed to be a showcase of our full web technology platform. It’s said from time to time that beautiful code has more to do with art than science: it’s easy to see what the code does without reference to documentation or comments because it’s clearly laid out and makes good use of the underlying platform to minimize unnecessary cruft. When I look at the way Video.Show uses LINQ to SQL to manage the various different data sources, I see some of that elegance in play - it’s genuinely a pleasure to browse through the source code and see how things are done. Video.Show uses Silverlight for the player experience, of course; the videos themselves are uploaded to the Silverlight Streaming content distribution network, so the server bandwidth hosting requirements are pretty lightweight.

Since we published the first release of Video.Show, we’ve seen many thousands of downloads, along with a number of real-world practical implementations. One of my favorites is filmsforlearning.org, a UK-based education site for students and teachers. There are already over a hundred videos on the site covering everything from chemistry to politics, and they’ve done a nice job of customizing the default Video.Show interface to add their own unique style along with new features like Windows Live ID integration.

While you’re having a look at Video.Show, also check out its sister project, Slide.Show, a straightforward control for publishing highly-customizable slide shows on the web, with picture data coming from a local store or from Flickr. It’s very well implemented and extensible for many other back-end image sources. Well worth investigating!

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Here’s a consolidated list of all the key downloads you’ll need to update your developer workstation to the latest and greatest technologies announced this morning:

• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1
  • Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x86)
  • Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x64)
  • Windows XP (x86)
  • Windows Server 2003 SP2 (x86)
  • Windows Server 2003 SP2 / Windows XP (x64)
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Runtime
• Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 and SDK
• Updated: Source Code / Unit Tests for Silverlight 2 Controls
• Expression Studio 2 Beta (contains Blend, Design, Encoder, Media and Web)
• Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview
• Updated: Expression DeepZoom Composer
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 2

A couple of tips:

• The Silverlight 2 Tools release (third item above) includes the Silverlight 2 runtime and the SDK. You don’t need to install the runtime separately first: just run the tools installer and you’ll have everything you need.
• The Visual Studio extensions don’t work with the Express editions - make sure you’ve got the full Visual Studio 2008 installed before attempting to install them.
• If you installed Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, uninstall it first, along with any related tools or SDKs before installing Silverlight 2 Beta 1. I watched someone get into a bit of a mess this morning by trying to update Silverlight 1.1 Alpha in-place. Fortunately, they were still able to uninstall and reinstall, but you’re definitely best to start with a clean machine.

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We’re already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out.This one is one of my favorites: TextGlow is a Silverlight 2 application that reads Word .docx files. The Open XML format is an ECMA-ratified standard, and having a web-based runtime with the power Silverlight makes it possible to accomplish something that I don’t think you could do easily with any other technology. TextGlow downloads Word documents asynchronously, opens them as ZIP files, parses them with LINQ-to-XML and then renders them using the WPF-based text and graphics APIs.

This is a big deal, and not just because it’s a cool Silverlight sample. In years gone by, if you wanted to share a document on the web, you’d typically have converted it to PDF format (assuming you had the full version of Adobe Acrobat on your system). Having two versions of the document meant changes were hard: you had to reconvert the document every time you made a change or the PDF file wouldn’t match the current version. TextGlow solves that problem by providing cross-platform access to the source Word document, regardless of whether you have Office installed on your machine or not. The version of TextGlow above is a demonstrator, but there’s endless potential for this. I hope the SharePoint team is watching, in particular.

TextGlow was written by Intergen, a New Zealand-based partner. You can read more about the way the application was built from one of the developers, James Newton-King.

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OK, so you’ve got all the bits downloaded and installed on your machine. What’s the best way to start to get familiar with everything we’ve added to Silverlight 2?

Well, you could do worse than start with the thirty page hands-on lab that I spent part of last week frantically working on! This lab takes you through the various steps of creating and packaging an application, figuring out layout and controls, all the way through to creating a mini-game using Silverlight 2. It’s a good lab to get familiar with XAML, Expression and the new Visual Studio tools.

Once you’re done with that lab, there are a number of others that you can go through to add depth to your knowledge, written by Adam and Laurence. Download them here. And if even that isn’t enough for you, there are some tutorials here that Jesse Liberty has been working on. Hopefully that’s plenty to get you up and running for now!

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 mentioned yesterday that the Hard Rock memorabilia application was live already at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com. The AOL Silverlight-based mail client is not live yet, but they’ve just opened up their pre-registration site for testers who want to be the first to try out the new application, in just a few weeks’ time. You can sign up here: http://ria.mail.aol.com/.In case you didn’t see the demo of this application either at the keynote or online, it’s cool because it shows how Silverlight isn’t just about flashy gradients or animations, but it’s emerging as a solid RIA framework for building web-based applications that have the performance of a desktop application. It’s not that you can’t build a mail client in AJAX, obviously, but having client-side compiled .NET code, isolated storage for caching and a powerful rendering engine that supports control templates means that you’re not relying on a chatty back-and-forth with a high latency remote web server. I’ve been using the application first-hand for demos over the last week, and there’s nothing like it for performance - being able to flip back and forward in milliseconds from folder to folder takes all the pain out of web-based mail. This application makes AOL a real contender in the free webmail space, and it really raises the bar for the experience that users will expect from a web-based mail interface.

Make sure you sign up!

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