there is an important announcement from the silverlight streaming team. looks like they are moving to some newer/better hardware infrastructure. please see the full announcement.
here's the gist as well:
Tonight (Tuesday, Jan. 8th) we’ll move the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service from its current hardware in Sandbox to a more permanent home on new hardware in the Production environment. Note that this doesn’t change anything to the fact that it is still provided as an Alpha version with no associated SLA.
At 9:00 pm PST the admin site front door (Silverlight.live.com) will be set to read-only. This means that your existing apps will still be able to function normally, whether hosted in SLS or hosted locally and fetching video content only from SLS. However you will not be able to provision new accounts and you will not be able to delete/change/upload content to the service, whether via the admin site or the API.
At 10:00 pm PST the DNS change will come into effect and all the traffic will be redirected to the new boxes in Production. There is a one-hour TTL on the old DNS so you may see some funkiness if you try to access some apps between 10:00 pm PST and 11:00 pm PST depending on what piece of the overall path (origin server, cached content in the CDN, etc.) to delivering your app and its content is still from the old config or already swapped to the new one.
At 11:00 pm PST everything should be back to normal. The old DNS will be inactive. The new hardware and new DNS will be the only one in operation in the Production environment. If you see any issues with your apps after that time, please report it to the dev forum on Silverlight.net or reply to this post.
miss the days of devdays? me too. my team is trying to bring a little of that spark back! joe shirey on my team has organized a full-day of developer and architect goodness. we'll be hosting two events, one in the phoenix, arizona metro area and one in the denver, colorado metro area. here's the gist:
keynote: microsoft patterns and practices is being shipped in to talk about what they've produced and the logic behind it!
developer track:
- exposing and consuming data using the microsoft stack (rob bagby): take a look at the ado.net entity framework, linq and the ado.net data services (project 'astoria').
- office as a developer platform (tim heuer): didn't know you could easily write office applications using managed code? let me show you how easy it is and what visual studio 2008 has done to enable this and make it even easier.
- what is new in visual basic 9 (beth massi): that's right. beth massi -- if you are a vb'er, you've no doubt heard the name from the vb team. we convinced her that she needed to be a part of this and she agreed! come learn from beth all the new goodness that is VB9: xml literals, object initializers, anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions and some wicked intellisense improvements!
architect track:
- why user experience matters: face it, developers are not good at defining user interfaces and thus it is often an aspect that is left out. let's discuss the reason this needs to change and how attention to the user experience affects application adoption.
- agile development at microsoft: the team from patterns and practices will discuss how they have fully adopted agile methods in their development team and their learnings over the years.
- the Windows Live platform: think windows live is just virtual earth? think again! come hear about the services available to you as service-based building blocks that microsoft has exposed for your use!
this is going to be a great day and a must-see event. it is completely free to attend. come hang out with us. we will also have a couple of surprises throughout the day and some fun stuff to show as well.
register for your event today:
PHOENIX 29 JAN REGISTER HERE
DENVER 31 JAN REGISTER HERE
do not miss out on this opportunity to hear from some locals as well as some people we are dragging out from redmond and the product teams!
as some of you know i've been silent for a lot of december due to a series of unfortunate incidents. the worst of which was a phone call that my wife was being air-evac'd from our neighborhood. yeah, not a good call. she was hit by a car while cycling. she is getting better now after a surgery and physical therapy. not back 100%, not even 70% but getting better daily. in the midst of all of this, i've been battling kidney stones. anyone who has had these knows that pain killers are your best friend right now. i've had 3 over the month of december and have 1 more still in the track...and it sucks going day-to-day not knowing if it will be a painful day...so if you see me bust out the ziplock with two pills in it...you know it's a bad day :-).
anyhow, i came home today from going into the office and my wife asked me what the 'nm .net user group' was. i gave her that 'why are you snooping on me and how did you figure out my email password' look. then she handed me this card:
wow. way cool. the folks of the new mexico .net user group community sent my wife and me a card. some well wishes to my family to get better. i thought that was a very thoughtful gesture on behalf of them and from my family a very sincere and humble 'thank you' goes out to you all. we've been blessed with a lot fo local and distant friends and maybe i'll get around to posting some thoughts on being humble and accepting help...but i'll have to think of a geek twist on it ;-)
i've really enjoyed seeing the growth of the new mexico .net community over the past 2 years thanks in part to a lot of people. i think they are even experiencing growing pains right now, which can be frustrating but is always a sign of success i believe.
so thanks again to the new mexico .net user group -- if you are a developer in new mexico, you need to be a part of this community. it is growing and they are doing exciting things. there are passionate people involved helping drive direction to serve the community...so get out there and be a part of it!
well, it's been a while since the phoenix installfest and i've been behind on a few things. on 20 dec 2007, the arizona user group communities hosted the phoenix installfest in tempe, arizona. special thanks to a lot of people, but namely scott cate, spike xavier, lorin thwaits (cameraman), steele price and my comrades rob bagby, eric strait and dan willis.
tempe center for the arts was our host venue for the night. i personally thought it was a kick arse venue even if the food was not the greatest (blame me for that, but you shouldn't complain, it was free ;-)). a lot of work went into organizing that event down to the wire and i was glad to see over 200 people show up. i wish we could have hosted more, but we were limited by the venue!
at the end of the night, a lot of people stayed the entire time, a lot of great prizes were distributed and best of all, the attendees walked away with a copy of visual studio 2008 for thanks in being a part of the user communities. if you aren't a part of a .net user group in your area -- find one and get involved. participate and be active.
we shot some video from the event and i put it up on silverlight streaming services for you to see. it doesn't auto play so after the initial buffering, hit the play button:
thanks again to everyone who showed up and hopefully you had some fun in tempe!
