Duncan Mackenzie .NET

When I joined my current team, it was called the Channel 9 dev team, because Channel 9 was the big site that they had built and was the center of all of their efforts. You certainly wouldn’t have known that from how we spent the last two years though :) We built a whole new code base for a video bl […]

We recently had Donovan West (LiveGadgets.net) build us a set of sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista. These gadgets use the RSS feeds from each site and let you see all of our new content as it gets posted, then (using Silverlight) you can even play our videos right there on your desktop.   Yo […]

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the […]

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I thought it was neat that I could right-click the main project (excluding all our client script and HTML) that runs behind on10.net, pick code metrics and see cool #s like "23,442 lines of code" :) […]

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great […]

I'm part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I've been thinking about mobile interfaces lately... so I'm trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface... one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 […]

The auto inclusion of all our CSS files has finally become too annoying. We'll still use the app_theme directory, as it is a handy way to store our stuff... but I'm really hoping to not set the theme, and to add the appropriate CSS for the situation (mobile vs desktop for example) while also […]

My team builds a fair number of community sites including Channel 8 (for Students), TechNet Edge (for IT Pros), Channel 10 (for enthusiasts, power […]

I'm very excited about it... really! I just got distracted on http://sitemaps.org and ended up building a site map for this site... real brute force, just grabbed all the blog entries and tags and output the appropriate absolute paths into some objects that I then wrote out into an XML document. Sam […]

One of their users emailed us to comment on our video quality... essentially pointing out that it sucked when viewed through their TV using TV Tonic. Well I was puzzled because, while we don't ship out DVD quality video, our high quality download is quite good for a podcast. Turns out though, after […]

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very […]

In an interview with Adam Kinney on Channel 9 today, Sampy goes over how the player works and why using the JavaScript and templates from Expression Media Encoder saved us a bunch of hassle […]

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A few of my friends and co-workers have jumped on the FeedBurner bandwagon, and I've been pretty impressed with the stats they've been gathering. I'm not willing to send […]

Continuing on in the same pattern as my last post, adding Soapbox support to C9's forums, Adam Kinney bugged me a bit and I went ahead and added support for Silverlight Streaming as well. It will be interesting to see if (or more accurately, how long before) someone turns this to malicious p […]

When I started on the C9 dev team, one of the first things I did was to remove the ability for users to post embed, object and script tags. We had a couple of people abusing this feature and I wanted to lock it right down. The downside to this move was that it prevented some forms of user interactio […]

In the new code that we are building for Channel 9, we have a few HTML popups here and there... floating divs for user info being one example. At the same time as we've been adding that feature, we also moved from using Windows Media Player to using Silverlight as our video player. […]