Channel 9 video review: Mike Sampson - Building a Silverlight player for Channel 9
WARNING! You may need to watch this video twice. That awesome Star Destroyer model distracted the hell out of me the first time. 
Looks like it had the same affect on a few other people, too.
Apparently, Adam Kinney didn’t have to walk far for this interview. Currently, his office neighbor, Mike Sampson (a.k.a Sampy), works on the Silverlight-based media player for Microsoft’s Channel 8 and Channel 9 websites. So for about fifteen minutes, Mr. Sampy animatedly discusses his extremely positive experience using the Expression suite and Silverlight to bring this media player to life.
According to Sampson, it didn’t take much. Expression Encoder ships with a fully skin-able, customizable JavaScript-based Silverlight media player that he simply reused. So he actually spent more time shoe-horning the player into the Channel 8 site structure than writing media player code! And, when he needed to add functionality to the prepackaged Silverlight control, for example showing a preview image when the video idles in the “stop” state, the library presented easy hooks for him to do so. I found it interesting when he mentioned that Microsoft apparently geared the defaults for their player template towards creating a YouTube-style site. I don’t doubt Microsoft would love for more social networking/video-sharing site content to come through their player.
A shame YouPorn (you’ll have to find the link on your own ) hasn’t switched over…that would make an interesting case study.
Not that I’ve downloaded anything from YouPorn’s 569 overflowing pages of video, of course.
Well, 570 as of today.
Uhhh…moving on…
While trying my best to listen to Mike Sampson and not fall under the spell of that sweet Star Destroyer, several thoughts skittered across my brain:
#1) Using Expression Studio 
makes Silverlight/WPF development tremendously easier
I know plenty of web designers and all of them can hand-code HTML like crazy. But, few of them actually WANT to. So quite frequently, they start prototyping their site in a tool like Dreamweaver, letting it generate large swaths of HTML content. Then, they either hand tweak that HTML to their liking or copy it into their own templates and continue working from there. The same concept applies to XAML. Sure, I can quickly slap some XAML for my tutorials together in a few minutes, but I definitely wouldn’t want to say, recreate iTunes’ interface using only Notepad. By reusing the same UI framework and project file format (also the one used by Visual Studio), it looks like Microsoft has made moving between Expression tools very easy. I may have to give Expression Designer and Expression Blend a shot before I become sick of rewriting the same boilerplate XAML. I just wish a decent free alternative to the Expression suite existed. But perhaps, the built in XAML visual designer shipped with Visual Stuido 2008 Express Edition(s) will fill help that void.
#2) Media is King
From the almost sexual intertwining of Silverlight and the Halo 3 trailer to the barrage of demos, websites, and sample code that focus on using Silverlight to play videos, Microsoft leaves no doubt that Silverlight is the “killer app” for quickly delivering high resolution video over the web. As I mentioned in a previous Channel 9 video review, Scott Guthrie said that streaming media drives browser plugin deployments, and clearly Microsoft wants Silverlight deployed on as many desktops as possible, so I don’t foresee their focus on media-centric websites and applications waning anytime soon.
#3) Declarative UI is SWEET
More than once during the interview, Sampy talks about how using Silverlight allows him to bask in beauty of a clean separation between code and UI. He describes a holy grail of developer/designer workflow that many web frameworks have strained and yet failed to reach: total independent development of code and UI, later easily “blended” together to Just Work ™.
Now that’s the stuff dreams are made of.
HTML showed us what could happen when you put an easy, declarative, low-barrier-to-entry UI “language” into to the hands of Joe average developer: millions of websites that provide new opportunities to share information. For .NET, WPF brought this development model to the desktop and Silverlight gives developers a chance to take what HTML started to a whole new level.
Conclusion
Typically, I brush off Silverlight media player tutorials and demos because once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. This video however, kept me totally interested (and not just because of the Star Destroyer…really 
). I’ve got a W2K3 server setup, so I might try some WMV streaming video in Silverlight 1.0, just for fun. By the way, I watched this video on a Silverlight player directly embedded in a web page displayed in Firefox running on a Mac. With the exception of some video/sound sync issues (I have a nasty habit of constantly overtaxing my workstation, so I’ll chalk it up to that) it rendered fast and seamlessly.
Silverlight kicks ass.
You can also see the fruits of Sampson’s labor at Channel 8.
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