Als developer bij Wortell houd ik me voornamelijk bezig met de laatste Microsoft technologieën zoals Surface, Silverlight, Azure, Windows Phone 7, Lync, HTML5, Kinect. Daarnaast heb ik ook kennis van andere mobile systemen zoals IOS.

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The last few months Wortell has been playing with the Silverlight bits for Pivot.
Today the Pivot team has released the PivotViewer Control for public download.

For more information on Pivot, have a look at the Pivot website at http://getpivot.com

On the Silverlight portal you can find more information on the PivotViewer Contol at http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/

Danny wrote a post on the Pivot desktop version a little while back. In his article he show you the FIFA World Cup matches. We will make this soon available in Silverlight.

I will also soon write an article on getting you pivot collections in to the cloud using Azure.

Go and play, it’s powerful stuff

Starting from February Microsoft is billing for Windows Azure. For those of us that have not been able to play / test with Windows Azure, Microsoft created three offers free of charge:

Open to Everyone:  Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special Offer.

For Microsoft Partners:  Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special Offer for Microsoft Partner Network members.

For MSDN Subscribers:  Windows Azure Platform MSDN Premium Offer for MSDN Premium Subscribers.

You can read more in the Windows Azure Team Blog

Have fun!

In November of last year, Microsoft release SFM, Silverlight Media Framework PDC Release.
We have been using IIS Smooth Streaming en different projects at Wortell.
On my current project for education we are using Silverlight Media Framework as well, where we are building exiting tooling around the SMF player for teachers and students.

With the SFM 1.1 release, progressive download is now fully supported making the SFM a fantastic framework to build on for any kind of video playing.

Updates in version 1.1 release

• Progressive Download is now fully supported.
• Integration with the SmoothStreamingMediaElement Beta 2 Release

You can download SFM 1.1 on codeplex.

On silverlight.net you can find how to videos on SMF to get you up to speed:

Embedding The Video Player
Styling And Templating The Video Player
Extending The Video Player
Out Of Stream Data Access
Using Application Settings
Creating Custom Timeline Markers
Building A Custom Bitrate Meter
Using SMF Logging
Live Mode vs. VOD
Hosting VOD using IIS Media Services

and / or download code samples

Today Microsoft announced an extra Release Candidate of VS 2010 and .NET 4. This release will be available in February 2010 for public download and will have the “go live”label.

The downside is that the final release date will be moved back a few weeks.

In Windows 7 you can easily create bootable VHD’s.  As a developer I think this is great especially now after PDC with so many beta releases. With a bootable VHD you can make full use of your hardware and keep a clean production machine. In this post I’ll show you the steps to create a bootable VHD that has been created in Windows Virtual PC.

The steps that we need to take are as follows:

• Create a virtual machine using Windows Virtual PC (If you already have one, go to step 2)
• Open you virtual machine in Windows Virtual PC
• Run sysprep
• Make it bootable

First you need a virtual machine. You can create a new one or use an existing one.
Open the virtual machine using Windows Virtual PC. When the virtual machine is loaded and you have logged in, run sysprep.
Open the command prompt as administrator. In the command prompt type:

c:\windows\system32\sysprep\ sysprep /generalize /shutdown

This will open the System Preparation Tool. Be sure to select the Generalize checkbox.

The next step is to add the VHD to the boot menu.
On your main system open the command prompt as administrator and type:

C:\>bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Beta System VHD"

This will great a GUID for your new entry. Copy this and use it in the line below:

C:\>bcdedit /set {98684a74-c96a-11de-a111-002170eb3c93} device vhd=[c:]\VHD\BetaSystem.vhd
C:\>bcdedit /set {98684a74-c96a-11de-a111-002170eb3c93} osdevice vhd=[c:]\VHD\BetaSystem.vhd
C:\>bcdedit /set {98684a74-c96a-11de-a111-002170eb3c93} detecthal on

Note: point the vhd= to your VHD on you file system.

That’s it. If you reboot your system, you will see you new VHD in the boot menu.

You can also create an VHD using the Disk Manager. Aviraj Ajgekar’s writes a great article on his blog “Windows 7: Boot from VHD First Impression”.

I hope this helps you having a clean production system.
Happy programming,

A special thanks to Volkert for testing this with me!