Content tagged with [evnetdev] on DuncanMackenzie.net

The new and improved Channel 9 has shipped!

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:27:00 GMT

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 blog site and launched a new site (Channel 10) on that code, bringing some of the video style of Channel 9 to a new audience. We often discussed, as we shipped out revision after revision of the Channel 10 home page, that our next goal would be to ship out a new version of Channel 9… all moved onto that new code. Things didn’t go according to plan though, and we shipped out VisitMix.com, Channel 8, and TechNet Edge (for IT Pros) before we were really given more than a moment’s peace to start planning out the work to deploy Channel 9 on a new code base.

When it did become time to plan the channel 9 deployment, it turned out that, while the new code base was a major improvement in many ways, the feature gap between what was already available on 9 and what the new code could offer was substantial. Now at least a year and a half had gone by since I joined the Channel 9 dev team, and we could see a long road ahead of us to get the next version of Channel 9 shipped; all the while, new features, bug fixes and UI changes for the other channels kept coming up and mixed priorities from above meant that we still had to devote most of our time to those properties. Finally, at the start of this year (2008), I was asked to start laying out a firm plan that would get Channel 9 v4 (as we took to calling it) shipped. As part of that, we gained a new focus on channel 9 and were able to finally prioritize it above some of the day to day needs of our other properties. We weren’t completely focused on the task, but we finally had the ability to say no to most things that would pull us away from C9… progress began to be made. At the start of May of this year we shipped out a beta version of Channel 9, and by the end of the month (June 2nd to be precise) we did the final switch over, made the DNS change that pointed channel9.msdn.com at a new set of web servers, and v4 was officially launched. Over the next week or so, we were bogged down dealing with a wide variety of bugs that didn’t turn up during our own testing or in the beta, but the site stabilized and is now running fairly well. We still have bugs, but the old site had bugs that had sat for months, so I think we are in pretty good shape. You can see a picture gallery of the various Channel 9 home pages that were envisioned or deployed throughout the past few years, including the new one… and a similar gallery representing the many home pages of Channel 10 that we shipped over the course of just a few months.

version 3, C9 when I joined the team (shipped August 2005)

new, v4 (June 2, 2008)

all in all, I’m very happy with the site we shipped last week and very impressed with the team behind it all… it has been a busy couple of years, but it is nice to have tangible (if you can consider the web tangible) results that you can point at when you are thinking about what you’ve accomplished.

Sidebar Gadgets for Channel 9, Channel 8 and more

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:32:00 GMT

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.

You can check out the gadgets (for Channel 9, Mix, C8, Edge, and on10.net) by clicking on the appropriate image below:

ImageShack Toolbar causes incorrect results from ASP.NET's browser checking code

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:09:00 GMT

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 no-script experience. We were puzzled, but one of the users figured out that their ImageShack toolbar might be causing the problem. Sure enough, after I installed that same toolbar myself I was able to test and confirm that it truly is causing the confusion.

Using a little test page, http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/services/browserinfo.aspx (feel free to use it for your own testing), I received the following results for Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Vista before installing the ImageShack toolbar.

Request.Browser

.Type: Firefox2.0.0.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 2.0.0.11
.Browser: Firefox
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

After installing the toolbar, I get this:

Request.Browser

.Type: Mozilla1.8.1.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 1.8.1.11
.Browser: Mozilla
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

Note the version change and the change in Request.Browser.Browser, certainly enough to throw off our atlas-compatibility check. I haven't figured out the appropriate fix for this yet, but it is nice to at least have one possible explanation as to why valid browsers are sometimes seeing our 'no script' experience.

Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and the EvNet project

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:24:00 GMT

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" :)

Lately though, I've seen us reducing that number while adding features, so this might the highest result I'll ever see for this project :)

The Viewport Meta Tag and the iPhone

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 08:55:00 GMT

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 discussion of the viewport meta tag on furbo.org (the apple developer site provides the same info in a more reference format). Turns out this simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone (relative to a desktop that is). I don't have an iPhone, or an iPod touch for that matter (I gather the experience would be similar... if you don't want to get a full blown cell account I'd suggest the 'touch' for testing purposes), although I found a great testing site for the iPhone (best viewed with Safari 3.0 on your desktop).

Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 10:39:00 GMT

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 Signals is thinking about the same thing these days and they've made a blog post looking for exactly the same thing I am, examples of good mobile interfaces. I'm looking for sites that are some combination of text and video blogging and are usable via a relatively modern phone. I found a lot of the comments to that post to be completely unhelpful... because they were focused on sites that are specific to the iPhone! Building an interface for the iPhone is not a bad idea, but I certainly wouldn't try to do that until after we had a good general purpose interface for a much wider variety of mobile devices. I did find a few interesting sites though, from the comments and from another site (Brian Cantoni's list of good mobile sites at http://cantoni.mobi/):

http://mobile.seriouseats.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
http://bbcriver.com/ (seems like it would benefit from some paging, but I could be wrong... is one big page better on a phone than paging?)
http://m.joystiq.com/

Of course, all of these map well to the home page of our site(s) (like on10.net or Channel 9), I wonder if there are any good examples for a web forum? I'm pretty sure that a lot of our users would like to be able to view Channel 9's Coffeehouse on their mobile device, and off hand I don't know what the ideal experience for that would be.

On a related note, Brian Cantoni (the author of that list of good mobile sites) has a great series of blog articles about testing your web applications across all major smartphone platforms.

I'm planning to get rid of setting our Theme in ASP.NET

Duncan Mackenzie — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:46:00 GMT

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 combining our CSS files and 'minifying' them all through a simple 'css.ashx' style handler. This should make it easier to do that combining at run time, while leaving them nice and separate for debug and development purposes.

We might still have it set in development mode though, if it is necessary to get some of the editor awareness of our CSS... but I think we can make it work.

Death to app_themes!

Search Engine Optimization Tweaks over the long weekend

Duncan Mackenzie — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 07:57:00 GMT

My team builds a fair number of community sites including Channel 8 (for Students), TechNet Edge (for IT Pros), Channel 10 (for enthusiasts, power users and gamers), Mix Online (for web developers and designers) and the original site... Channel 9 (aimed mostly at developers) ... and we've recently starting putting out sites on a new code base. One of the changes in that new code base was a move to an AJAX style interface for viewing lists of posts on the page. We like the way this works for paging through lists of entries, comments, etc... but we have known from the beginning that it was going to cause us some trouble in the world of search engines and other crawlers. Without JavaScript, there was very little being output onto the page, and what was there was mostly navigational chrome. Taking a look at Google's cache of TechNet Edge from a few days ago gives this:

Checking how your page appears in the cache of Google or Live is one way to check how you appear to crawlers, but it doesn't work great when you are making changes or running in development. One handy way is to check your site using Lynx, like Joshua mentions in this post on Mix Online.

The content on the site was ending up in the index of search engines anyway, through the virtue of RSS feeds and incoming links... but the value of your site to crawlers is going to be much lower than it should be if they don't see any content when they visit. As I said earlier... we always knew this would be a problem, but I guess we just didn't get around to fixing it before pushing out a full three sites using AJAX based paging. Last week I had a meeting with a SEO consultant and they pointed out the exact issue I've been describing. Well... given a long weekend... and no interest in working on my actual planned tasks... I decided to implement two features to help how our sites appear to crawlers.

First, I added some code that swaps out our fancy Ajax entry list with a simple ASP.NET repeater if the browser doesn't appear to be one that is supported by Microsoft Atlas, making our site usable to other browsers (Atlas supports the bulk of users, but not all) and also making our content visible to a crawler. So far, I only output the first page of any given entry list, but that makes the results go from blank to this:

Next, I added an XML sitemap, following the specs from sitemaps.org, by outputting a sitemap index at http://<site>/sitemapindex.ashx and then outputting a series of sitemaps (by page #) from http://<site>/sitemap.ashx?page=<number> (see Mix's sitemap index, and sitemap as an example). Finally, I put a link to the sitemap index into the robots.txt file for each site.

Between the two, I'm hoping our content will get indexed better by a variety of search engines, resulting in more people finding us when searching for relevant topics. These changes also help to make us a little bit more usable to some users, but that is another area where we need to do a lot more work. If these changes improve our accessibility that's great, but I'd hate to even suggest that they get us anywhere near our goals in that area.

Picked up Mass Effect today... built XML site maps instead of playing it :(

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:02:00 GMT

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. Same method wouldn't work on Channel 9 though, it has too many entries, so I'll need to move to a site map index with multiple sub site maps... now I just have to figure out how to divide the entries up (by tag, by type of content, by date?).

Anyone have contacts with TVTonic?

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:39:00 GMT

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 installing TV Tonic and picking on10.net out of their catalog, that the feed they have in their system is our 512kbps WMV feed... which is certainly not the best quality around, around 430kbps for video and 320x240... fine for display on our site, but not the hottest around... instead they should be using our WMV (high quality) feed (2500 kbps, 640 x 480), but I have no idea how to tell them about it. I've emailed their support address, but didn't ever hear back from them....

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:56:00 GMT

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 highly supported and recommended by many folks), if you are in the market for some free blogging code.

Sampy explains how we built the Silverlight player for Channel 8

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:25:00 GMT

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

See this video on Channel 9!

We added a Silverlight player to Channel 8 today

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 08:49:00 GMT

We used a modified version of one of the templates that ships with Expression Media Encoder as our player... and channel 8 has become the first of our sites (which include Channel 9, Channel 10, VisitMix.com and more) to have a Silverlight video player on them. And, below here, you can see that player embedded into this blog post...

Note that I had to remove the 'scrubbing bar' due to some odd bug around releasing the mouse after scrubbing was completed... but we'll figure that out and get it back in as soon as we can. Check out the video above back in its home on C9.... check out the video from above on on Channel 8, and build your own player using those templates!

Tracking RSS Feed Statistics

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:58:00 GMT

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 my readers off to someone else's service though (even though there are some reasonably safe ways to do that), so I started to think about how best to gather similar info myself. One idea would be to ship the IIS logs from my site back to my PC on a regular basis and run them through a LogParser script that would figure out all the stats for me... but that seems like a rather manual (or difficult to automate) and data transfer intensive method.

Instead, what I decided to do was to log every feed requests into a table on my SQL Server (actual SQL updates occur at regular intervals, not on every feed request). I log the feed URL being requested, the user agent of the requester, the IP Address of the requester, the number of subscribers represented by the user agent string (Google's feed reader, amongst others, indicates the # of subscribers in the user agent string) and the date/time they made the request.

What happens next is currently a manual process, but I'm working on making it automatic...

For a given 24-hour period:

I sum up the number of requests by user agent/IP address combo
I filter down to user agent/IP address combos that made more than one request to the same feed during that time period... this is intended to distinguish between a manual user visit and an RSS aggregator. (of course, if an RSS aggregator is set to be very polite and only hit my site once per day, then this will cut those #s out of the list)
I sum up the average subscriber # for all useragent/IP address combos ... to avoid counting any single aggregator user more than once and also to accommodate any fluctuation in web aggregator subscriber counts throughout the day.

This produces a final # that I believe is roughly accurate... 792 (for the past 24 hours) across all of my feeds (mostly either the main feed or the Visual Basic feed).

About half of the requests (244 total) filtered out because they made only one request in 24 hours do appear to be aggregators (looking at user agent strings) so that would add 120 or so to this #, but in the interest of not inflating the numbers, I think I'll stick with the calculations I've worked out so far. My other worry is that some of the web-based aggregators might be producing some duplicate values due to multiple source IP addresses, probably as a result of having aggregation code running on multiple nodes of a web farm.

Has anyone else tried to implement their own FeedBurner-style stats? Any thoughts on my logic so far?

Added Silverlight Streaming support to Channel 9's forums

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 06:11:00 GMT

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 purposes.

Added Support for Soapbox Videos on Channel 9

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:34:00 GMT

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 interaction/posts that we didn't really mind and in some cases would even like to encourage.

As a small step towards a more community-driven future, I added support to C9 today to allow you to embed Soapbox videos in any forum post. Simple use the following markup in your post:

[soapbox video="(soapbox video id)"]

and it will turn it into a full blown embed tag with a link to the source material underneath. The Soapbox video id is simply the GUID that appears on the permalink url (http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=5699dafe-d864-4d1f-976c-d5f4d9ed78db for example) for a video and also shows up in its embed code if you take a look at that as well.

Overlaying HTML over Silverlight

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:48:00 GMT

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.

We ran into a bit of an issue though, in that our floating HTML was sitting under the Silverlight player, no matter what I did with the z-index of the two areas of the page.

That just wouldn't do, so I asked Adam Kinney (Silverlight Evangelist and former dev on the C9/C10 team) what to do. He pointed me to the 'isWindowless' property of the Silverlight object and that info, combined with this KB article about Windowless controls, was enough for me to figure out what to do.

Changing our player creation script to include this property solved the issue:

Silverlight.createObjectEx( { source: this.get_playerXaml(), 
parentElement: this.get_playerHost(), 
id:this._hostname, 
properties:{ width:'322', height:'296', 
version:'1.0', isWindowless:'true', 
inplaceInstallPrompt:'true'  }, 
events:{
onLoad:Function.createDelegate(
this, this._handleSilverlightPlayerLoad) }} );

producing a much nicer result...