Inside Channel 9 - Channel 9

The Channel 9 beta has been updated...

Duncanma — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:30:12 GMT

I know you've heard it before, but we are heading down the final path to ship.... really we are :)

As part of that path, we've been working hard for the past few months focused on making sure that our new code base meets the expectations of you folk, the Niners. What has that meant? Well, it meant new features of course, but it also meant extending some of our existing code to make it more enjoyable for how people use Channel 9... even modifying our initial ideas around the UI and the UX to make it both an improvement and familiar.

That is probably already enough talk for most people, so for all of those folks ... please feel free to jump over to the beta (http://beta.channel9.msdn.com), check it out, and provide feedback.

I do want to explain what is new/improved, what is missing and what are known beta issues that we are planning to fix in the short term. We'll go through these features/differences in an upcoming dev diary, but for now here it is in basic text form.

What's New/Improved

Browser/Standards compatibility

Nearly identical experience across IE and FF and the site is very usable in Opera and Safari
Font scaling (make your text size larger/smaller in your browser and the site stays usable and looking good) is now possible

Videos

Support for multiple video and audio formats (MP4, Zune formatted WMV, High Quality WMV, Regular WMV, WMA and MP3) with corresponding RSS feeds for use with aggregators including Zune and iTunes
Silverlight Player with an available iFrame for inclusion in other web sites
The ability to tell people about your favorite videos using a direct post to Facebook, Digg or Deli.cio.us link

Forums/Commenting

Asynchronous (AJAX) paging through comments on videos, threads in the forums and more
New "Reply To" model that automatically displays the comment you are replying to hooked up to your comment
New Editor with broad browser support

User Submitted content (wiki/sandbox)

Added commenting to wiki pages
Async history browsing and editing
New syntax matching codeplex's wiki syntax
Tagging support added to the Sandbox, so that uploaded samples can be categorized (think C#, Web, WPF)

What's Missing/Coming Soon

"Recent Changes" pages/feeds in the wiki are no longer available (will return)
"Compare with previous" no longer available (will return)
IE 6 support has issues, mostly around our extensive use of transparent PNGs :)
Profiles are really lacking compared to how they are in the current C9 (some improvements planned, will plan more based on your feedback!).
Watched Threads is gone.
User info (blog, web site, caption) on posts is gone, but will come back later in some form of quick info pop-up.
No Emoticons in the editor (coming soon)
No Poll
No Quote option for replying

Note: The beta itself is missing some things just because it is a beta, including Live ID sign-in... and our data isn't anywhere near up-to-date between the live and beta sites.

I'm sure there is more, but please check it out now and let us know what you think. There is a feedback forum (http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/forums/feedback) on the new site, but I've also created a page for the beta on uservoice.com, you can check it out here http://channel9.uservoice.com and you can use that site to submit comments, ideas, and to vote on other people's feedback.

Dev Diary for April 23

Duncanma — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:43:01 GMT

We're back with another update! This time we have a mix of content, including:

Sampy talking about SQL optimization using indexed views
Erik covering a relatively simple, but useful, web control and explaining a bit about how we build our UI components as he goes (and you can get the controls he demos right from here)
Sampy showing off the wiki, in a unskinned but functional state (like any good demo, we even included a surprise error!)
Me demoing nothing and generally blathering on in a managerial way

Dev Diary for April 15th

Duncanma — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:36:12 GMT

Just a quick, and poorly filmed, update from the dev team on what we worked on during the last sprint and what we are building right now. Yes the filming is shoddy, and yes the screens are hard to read... we'll get better, but we didn't want to spend a lot of time redoing this one when we know you'd rather we keep focused on developing the dev site :)

The Channel 9 beta has been updated

Duncanma — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:42:48 GMT

Hey folks, it has been awhile since we first published the Channel 9 beta site and we thought you might be wondering where we are with the whole 'new Channel 9' project. Well, we have been moving forward on many different areas of the code and we even shipped a new production site (http://Channel8.msdn.com) built on the exact same code base. All of the work done since we last updated the beta site is hard to describe in a few lines of text, but let me give it a shot anyway :)

First and foremost, we have added the idea of 'managed tag pages'. These pages take the idea of filtering content by a certain tag and then add in the concept of an 'editor' for that tag's area. The editor will be your guide to the topic in question, selecting content from Channel 9 to feature on the page, blogs that should be included and more. We haven't fully configured it, but you can see an example of what I mean on the Silverlight tag page, where Adam Kinney is designated as the ownere of that page. You still get your straight filtered list of videos (right in the what's new area) but you can also see recommended or featured content along the upper right. We have more planned for the managed tag pages, but for now I hope this gives you an idea of what is to come in that area.

The other major change is around the style of the site. In addition to a ton of minor changes, (many of which were as a direct result of feedback from you Niners), the site was made much more consistent overall. The fonts, HTML tags and information displayed have been standardized around the site; an entry displayed in the sidebar on one page should look exactly like another... this has the benefit of a better experience for you, and it also really simplifies our code, which is a great help for when we need to make ongoing changes or even launch a new site based off the same code.

Finally, we heard your comments around the new AJAX asynchronously loading of posts, threads and comments, and we acted on some of that feedback in this update. Your back button should work now, even when all you are doing is paging through the videos on the media page or all the comments on the current post. If you watch the address bar you'll also see that the page number is part of the URL, and that it is being updated as you page back and forth. With those URLs you'll be able to link someone right into a specific page in a discussion, as requested by your feedback on the first Beta site we shipped. The AJAX features have a bunch of other improvements added to them as well, including a 'throbber' animation to let you know when we are loading data and other less obvious changes.

Check it out over at http://beta.channel9.msdn.com and let us know what you think in the recent set of Halo 3 videos :)

Building a Silverlight player for Channel 9

AdamKinney — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:08:50 GMT

version 4 of Channel 9.

He discusses how he was able to reuse the code that comes with Expression Encoder and how, as the developer, he can code the player while the designer David Shadle can work on the design.

A preview of the player is available on Channel 8 today and I'm expecting the player to go live on the Channel 9 beta sometime in the near future.

Channel9 Version 4: 3 Minutes with the dev team

Sampy — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:46:48 GMT

We're working hard but we'll take three quick minutes to let you know what we're up to.

Enjoy.

Shipping the 10 update

Sampy — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:26:29 GMT

Last week we shipped out an update to 10 that not only refreshed the design but set up the EvNet platform to support Channel9.