First let’s get to the obvious Silverlight announcements we “knew” were coming during this keynote:

- Silverlight 2.0 Beta is available!
- Expression Blend 2.5 (!) March Preview is available!
- [update] Silverlight Beta tools for Visual Studio 2008 are available
- formal announcement of Silverlight Mobile device support!

In my presentation last weekend I was asked about Silverlight adoption stats, which I predicted we’d get during the keynote. We did, with:

- a montage of apps already built with Silverlight
- the stat of 1.5+ mllion installations of Silverlight runtime / day

Now, you can ignore the rest of my notes if you want, and go check out the Silverlight 2.0-powered Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia demo: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ It incorporates the “Big, Wide and Deep” Microsoft Research technology I wrote about a year ago. GREAT application of that technology.

…or, read on…

Silverlight and Media

3 key points here:

1. Improving experience: Adaptive Streaming – “please choose your connection speed” not only fails the Mom test but even for an “expert” you don’t know if you will receive consistent bandwidth over a shared or patchy connection. So the streaming service can now adjust the bitrate automatically even without user input. No code.
- Evidence: Move Networks – strategic partnership with Microsoft (Disney etc)

2. TCO: Streaming and progressive download experiences using Windows Media Services 2008, which is free to run on any Windows Server 2008 box. The quality of the service is a big reason why the Olympics will be hosted using Silverlight. For the case where users stop 1/2 way through a video, set up bitrate throttles for video, so that after a burst, you are only paying for x seconds of unwatched video.

3. Business Opportunities: Great demo of advertising intergration into a page using Silverlight, Blend 2.5 March Preview, Video.Show integration, XAML used to present dynamic ad content on top of video. Ari Paparo from DoubleClick showing advertising integration opportunities in order to monetise web properties.

Olympics Evidence for Silverlight Media: Perkins Miller, Sr VP Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics. 2200 hours of live coverage, which will then be made available as video on-demand (VOD). How to deliver in a way that is interactive? Today they delivered an engaging demo where you can do instant replays, overlay expert commentary, send and share links while watching, have a UI to see what’s going on across many feeds, set up picture-in-picture, watch 4 LIVE feeds at once, and have community interaction (see top videos etc.).

Silverlight and RIA
- Multi-Language support
- WPF UI Framework subset – layout management, data binding, styling, animation
- Robust networking stack (REST, SOAP, WS-*, standard HTTP endpoints, cross-domain networking, sockets)
- Integrated Data Support (incl. built-in support for LINQ, local cache)
- Small download, fast install: 4.3MB download, 6-10 seconds to install on clean machine
- Control templating and skinning model from WPF comes to Silverlight – including visual tree and animations!

- shipping the controls as source!!
- shipping a testing framework that allows you to write unit tests!
- shipping over 2000 unit tests that cover the Silverlight controls!

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and WPF 3.5 evidence

AOL - mail client – power of Control Templates, basically. meh.

Hard Rock and Vertigo - 70,000 pieces of rock memorabilia
***** Demo – first GREAT demo of the morning
2 billion pixels
oh my goodness: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Aston Martin – online, dealership and ownership experiences
- online – Silverlight experience
- dealership – WPF and XNA experience
- ownership – “true telemetry” proof-of-concept demo
p.s. I can please has an Aston Martin? for demo purposes?

Cirque du Soleil - WPF Line-of-business app demo – Head of Casting, Resident Shows America, Krista Monson
***** Demo – second GREAT demo of the morning!!
They managed to make a WPF line-of-business app demo really engaging and relevant. Wow.