Happy new year to all!  I hope you enjoyed a safe celebration whether that be playing a board game with friends, toasting the new year with some bubbly, throwing things at Ryan Seacrest on TV, or whatever.

Each quarter, new MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) candidates are awarded.  January 2010 is the first awards of the year and so I present the new/moved/re-awarded Silverlight specific MVPs:

• Jeff Prosise – If you aren’t subscribed to Jeff’s blog, stop and do so now.  It’s filled with some great nuggest that are usually on the advanced ‘how’d he do that’ side of things.  Jeff does a good job spelunking the framework and figuring things out.
• David Yack (@davidyack) – David is a CRM guru and has also written a great Silverlight 3 Jumpstart book (recommended for beginners).  He’s been spending more time with RIA Services for biz/CRM apps lately and been providing great insights into integration uses.  He should blog more :-)
• Laurent Duveau (@LaurentDuveau) – another re-award for Laurent who keeps cranking out great stuff and helps with the Silverlight Tour in Canada.
• Laurent Bugnion (@lbugnion) – one of the XAML experts at IdentityMine, Laurent also has written one of the definitive Silverlight reference books – and is one of the nicest guys you’ll meet.
• Ward Bell (@wardbell) – Ward has some great thoughts on application building for XAML clients and extensive experience with multicolored jackets and general antagonistic views ;-)
• Page Brooks – organizer of SilverlightContrib and various control development efforts in the community.  Control Wrangler?
• Rob Eisenberg (@EisenbergEffect) – one of the brains behind Caliburn, an Open Source Silverlight application framework.
• Andy Beaulieu – have you played a Silverlight game?  If you have, it’s most likely been one of Andy’s :-)
• Jordan Knight (@jakkaj)– hailing from down under (is that phrase still used?), Jordan does a lot in the Melbourne area around Silverlight community and has a great blog of content.
• Alessio Leoncini (@aleoncini) – One of our Italian friends that has been doing a lot in working with Silverlight in Italy and spreading the good word! Grazie!
• Andrew Tokeley – Andrew was one of the developers behind the Buttercup Reader, a completely accessible Silverlight application which is now Open Source.
• Koen Zwikstra (@kozw) – Have you heard of Silverlight Spy, the indispensible Silverlight debugging tool!?  Koen is the brain behind it.
• Qing Li is a new MVP in China that has been doing a great amount of work helping the community understand and learn Silverlight development.

Congratulations to all the new/renewed/moved Silverlight MVPs.  I look forward to seeing you at the MVP Summit soon!

I’ve never been so frustrated with a piece of software as I have been with iTunes lately.

NOTE: Yes, I work for Microsoft.  Yes I’m aware they make the Zune.  I’ve got years invested in hardware with iPods, and until someone makes an OEM integration kit as good as what I have, I can’t switch.  Truth be told, from a portable device player, I *do* think the Zune is better.  But let’s just leave that out of this argument for now.

In my home there are roughly 4 iPods floating around.  We have a library of over 5,000 songs both popular and not that are in our digital library.  That digital library is mostly MP3s, mixed with some iTunes purchased songs (although not since Amazon MP3 began).  That library sits on a shared drive on my Windows Home Server so it can be accessed through various streaming means (Home Server streams to iTunes software, XBOX, etc.).

Also in my home are roughly 6 computers ranging from desktop to laptops (mostly laptops).  These are used between my wife and myself (and one for the kids).

We all listen to music on our devices and via our machines.  We all want to listen to the same library, create our custom playlists and have them available everywhere.  We all want to be able to sync on whatever computer we want, but we’ll settle to be tied to one that you can pair with.

iTunes…sucks.

Yes, I’m looking at you iTunes.  I’m aware of the other options like Songbird, etc. but frankly I haven’t tried them out yet.  If you have and they will solve my woes, can you share your experiences?

Why does iTunes suck?  Easy…

• It assumes 1 user/1 computer – the “library” is a local and static library unless the user interacts with it.  What I mean by this is it does not have the ability to monitor folders (like pretty much every other software out there for media does).  I want to point my iTunes library to my server share and whenever I add music to it via other computers, that other ‘libraries’ will be aware of it and just add it to my local library.
• Portability sucks – try to transfer your iTunes library to another computer.  I dare you.  Navigate through all the Apple support suggestions and hacks online.  Frankly unless you are Mac to Mac migrating, it is not easy for a healthy configured library.
• Not informative – one of my biggest issues is that when I configure the library to be a mapped drive (let’s say M:), if M: is not available for some reason, iTunes decides on it’s own without telling me that it is going to switch the library back to the local volume/hard drive.  Any future action (i.e., iTunes purchasing, Amazon purchasing, etc.) now doesn’t save to my server library.  WTF?!  Can you at least tell me: Hey user, that location you set for your library, ‘M:’ is not available right now…what would you like us to do.  Stop moving it around for me.
• Home Sharing – what is this supposed to be again?  I thought this would save me.  I could have at least one place that would be the library and home share to other clients who could then use this feature to sync.  Um, nope.  This is basically the sharing they already had except with a new name.  Worthless.

I wish the iTunes team would put in their lab 3 iPods and 4 computers with 2 users and a library stored on the server.  Work toward making your software work in that environment as seamless as it does with 1 user and I’ll be happy.  Until then I have to navigate your changes and try my best to explain to my wife why the music we bough on the desktop is not on her laptop until she adds it to the library that is already mapped to the network share where the music already exists.  Yeah, that’s what I though.

I did my best to disconnect for a 2 week+ holiday at the end of this year.  It’s winding down and while the kids are napping (and the wife) I am bored and thought I’d post my list of movies I watched this break.  Having a full-time job that also happens to be your hobby plus two kids doesn’t leave a ton of time for theater going.  So this holiday I maximized my Netflix subscription both in DVD and (mostly) online instant watch via my XBOX.  Here’s some of my favorites. 

• The Yes Men – an interesting indie film of two guys’ satire site for the WTO turns them into representatives and gets them invited (by people who think they *are* the WTO) to conferences, etc.  What’s funny is that the only audience who called their BS and outlandish statements were university students.  Other world leaders and business executives didn’t budge on their absurdities.
• The Way We Get By – a touching documentary of a senior citizen group in Maine (gotta love those accents) and how they greet EVERY incoming US armed forces troops back to the states.  The dedication of this group is pretty humbling.
• MonsterCamp – no idea why I started watching this one, but didn’t last long – fantasy games are just not my thing…then introduce real-life re-enactments…sigh.  It was pretty funny to watch people call out their strengths: My destroy power 10 eliminates your 2 power power fist…or something like that.
• Food, Inc. – hands down, my favorite movie of the year.  You must set aside some time and watch this.  Amazing.  About the food industry over time and how very few actual companies control the food production in the US.  And the story of Monsanto is a bit frightening.
• McLibel – a close second to my favorite.  Apparently there is a law in the UK (not sure if it still exists) that people must apologize in public if a company thinks they are wronged.  Two people (not companies) refuse to do this and stand by their claims against McDonald’s.  The film documents their trial.  Stick it to the man.
• Outfoxed: Murdoch’s War on Journalism – interesting behind-the-scenes expose film about the FOX news network.  Truth be told, I bet similar things could be found about all media agencies.  This film though challenges your thought on mainstream media.
• America the Beautiful – a documentary about perception of beauty in America.  Film was ‘meh’ for me.  Not well done.
• Google Me – watch as Jim Killeen sets out to interview his search results.  I actually really enjoyed this one.  It was fun if anything for the voyeuristic nature of learning about different people.  The best part of the film is near the end with the rapid-pace answers by each of the 7 Jim Killeens hailing from all over the world.  Incidentally I had a question about the film, wrote to Jim (the director) and he quickly wrote me back…cool.
• 9/11: Press for Truth – chronicles mostly the Jersey wives that were in the news about getting the government to actually launch the 9/11 commission…and some of their disappointments.  I know 9/11 is a hot topic for people who are passionate about all sort of issues around the subject.  I was interested, and watched this film.  I leave no opinion here about the content.
• The Soloist – was hoping this would be a good movie for me.  I found myself doing other things in the background.  I think it was just too slow for me.
• The Maiden Heist – meh.  Lots of reviews of how funny it was.  It wasn’t.
• Watchmen – it took a while to get through near 3 hours of this film.  Was hoping for a little more comic book-ness out of it rather than what I got.  I liked the style of the film though.  Could have cut a lot of time out of the movie…like the superhero sex.  We get it, they hooked up.  I don’t need to see the dude’s arse.
• The Corporation – a documentary about the entity of ‘corporation’ and the history.  This was recommended to me by a few.  The style was not attention grabbing and I lost a lot of interest as I watched it.  It was, however, insightful of the history of the corporation.  Reminded me of learning about copyright laws from Lessig.
• Sherlock Holmes (theater) – I never remembered ol’ chap Sherlock being such a bad arse.  But he is in this movie.  I guess it’s the modern day budget interpretation of all the quirks of dear Holmes.  Entertaining flick.  Jude Law was the winner in this film.  I’m going to be him for Halloween…or the Butcher from Gangs of New York.
• Old Dogs (theater) – I thought this was an entertaining flick.  Call me lame, but it was some fun humor.
• The Blind Side (theater) – wow, great movie.  Had no idea about this story.  Cool to see how recent it was.  Recommend seeing this one.

Yes, I killed a lot of brain cells in the name of film entertainment for my holiday.  When you don’t sleep well and everyone’s doing their own thing, heck Netflix instant watch is a good thing to have on hand!  And yes, I like documentaries.  I like things that challenge mainstream thought as well as my own.  I enjoy ‘fun’ movies as well, but there hasn’t been a lot that have really reached my favorite bar in a while.  NOTE: My favorite movie is The Big Lebowski.  I’m looking forward to A Serious Man and The Informant.

One of the cool features of Windows 7 is the theme packs that are available.  I’ve been rotating between Bing’s Best, United States, Italy and Russia themes.  Great photography (and some have cool sound packs too).

Each month Smashing Magazine, one of my favorite online subscriptions, puts together a set of desktop wallpaper for the month with calendars on it.  These images are from various worldwide contributors.  Smashing Magazine is primarily a site for design (and does focus a lot on web design, etc.) and is a great resource for any one who appreciates design aspects.  They also provide free fonts, icons, web templates, etc. from time to time.

Anyhow, I’m fond of their monthly post of wallpapers to see what people come up with.  This time I figured: why not make a Windows 7 Theme out of these?  So I did.  Simple enough.

So here you go: Smashing Magazine January 2010 Desktop Wallpaper Windows 7 Theme (I contracted Microsoft marketing to come up with that name).  This is a widescreen theme as most of the wallpapers are widescreen – I think three in this set aren’t so when they rotate they may look weird, but I didn’t want to exclude any of them.  The sound for this pack is the Windows Default so if you want to make tweaks to it for your own liking, go for it.  I did, however disable the Start Navigation sound!!!

Enjoy.

It has been six months since installing my initial infrastructure to move away from paid television and toward a goal of free, digital/HDTV broadcast in my home.  On my last post - My move to free HDTV Part 2 -- it was about HD HomeRun to the rescue for a tuner solution to broadcast to my chosen infrastructure.

To recap, my goals:

• To get free network channels in HDTV quality
• To broadcast to my two primary rooms
• To enable DVR capabilities

My setup includes the following:

• Philips MANT940 – UHF digital antenna.  This is connected to a coaxial cable that was pre-wired in my home going from the attic to my structured wiring panel in my home.
• HD HomeRun – my antenna feed connects (well, first through a splitter – more on why later) to the HDHR unit here.  I’m only using one tuner although I have the two-tuner model (can’t remember why I bought that model, probably wasn’t paying attention).
• Windows 7 Ultimate – I have a 64-bit machine with 6GB RAM and 1TB of drive space that acts as my Media Center and receives the HDHR broadcast.  Media Center serves as my DVR.
• XBOX 360 (2) – These serve as my Media Center extenders as well as additional TV options.  I also receive Netflix streaming through one of them via my XBOX Live account.
• PlayOn – This software is installed on my same Media Center machine and provide capability to watch Hulu and other online TV broadcasts including Netflix as well.
• My Movies for Windows Media Center – this is a plugin/software for Media Center (that also works for extenders) that enables a better movie management option for your digital movie collection.  Full Disclosure: As a Microsoft employee I did get a deal on this software.  After seeing the value, I think the $100 is worth it if you have a large movie collection and watch them via Media Center.

The Success

I can say that I’ve reached success.  I am free of cable television bills for now and enjoy watching my desired television stations in crystal clear HDTV.  After my feeling of initial loss of my TiVo units, I haven’t missed them.  The TiVo interface is much more simplistic, but I have not lost functionality in moving to Media Center as my DVR component.

HD HomeRun has been the critical piece in this success.  I have a structured wiring system in my home and the ability to broadcast that signal from there is ideal.  There are some downsides which you can read about below.  The HDHR unit took some getting used to when setting it up, but that was a one-time task once my antenna was properly placed and I did a scan of available channels.  I not only receive local channels, but I’m close enough to some southern cities in Arizona and receive their stations as well (granted a lot of network duplicates).

I have the HDHR with 2 tuners which I initially thought was going to be worthless since I only had one input – my antenna.  Then I realized that I could still re-use my splitter in my structured wiring panel and get the antenna feed and provide two inputs.  This hasn’t really become a necessity yet (only would if two people wanted to watch two different channels), but nice to know it is there.

My XBOX/Media Center Extender in my main room starts up in Media Center mode to help those who just want to watch TV (more on why later in the failures section).  Downstairs where we watch more movies and Netflix streaming, it starts in normal XBOX dashboard mode.

Another key piece of this setup is the remote controls.  I have the Harmony 659 and 680 that I’ve had for a while.  While they work nice, they don’t map very well to the XBOX dashboard/Media Center controls.  They don’t have easy ‘back’ button integration (the 659 is old for sure and lacks a lot more) as well as some other easy function mapping on existing buttons rather than custom menu options.  I remembered recently that I did have the Logitech Harmony for XBOX remote.  This is an older version than their 510 model which is similar and has generic color buttons for other game consoles.  After remembering this I reconfigured my XBOX remote upstairs, removing the 659 from the picture.  This has proven so far to be a better decision as the remote maps a lot better to physical named buttons (Back, Info, Next, etc.) than using custom options that nobody was reading/understanding.  I highly recommend using the 510 or the XBOX remote for this instead of the fancier models they currently sell.  These two are adequate.  I’ll actually be picking up another XBOX remote for downstairs to replace the 680.

Some failures

I don’t think any success comes without failures :-) -- nor did mine.  Here are some of my issues…some of which may be deal-breakers for anyone else.

• Sports – I’m not a sports fan.  Not enough at least that I must watch Monday Night Football or college games, etc.  I consider myself a ‘championship’ sports fan (Super Bowl, World Series, etc.).  If you are a sports fan, this setup simply won’t work for you.  There are no live options for over-the-air ESPN broadcasts or even any online watching via these options is not great.  Media Center has some options but they are not live nor do they work through extenders.  If you love your sports, for now you’ll still be paying the cable bill.
• Remote Control – Media Center is not as intuitive as TiVo was for my non-tech savvy family/users.  We have babysitters for our kids occasionally and I felt like I needed to leave a manual for them each time we left to simply watch TV.  The new XBOX remote I remembered about should help this, but prior it was a lot of Okay, click this button and wait for things to turn on, then you’ll see this screen, scroll down to get to the guide, then click this.  Oh yeah and typing direct channel numbers won’t work.  And if you want to watch Movies, go here.  If it is a DVD, then do this.  It gets old.  For me, no problem.  For my wife – she is a little frustrated at times.  This is a learning curve.
• Home Server – Sometimes my home server got in the way because it also aggregates digital media (music/movies/etc.).  For instance, using the My Movies software, I had duplicate titles.  This is because by default it was looking at my Home Server Videos folder *AND* the Converted Videos folder.  Changing this to only look at the converted folder solved my problem, but it was a bit annoying at first.
• Changing Channels – you MUST use the guide or navigation pad on the remote (up/down).  Digital broadcast is no longer just “Channel 12” but rather Channel 12.1.  Remotes currently don’t have the decimal point to enter.  So if you typed 1-2-enter thinking you’d get to channel 12, it would tell you that channel doesn’t exist.  This is somewhat annoying, but only for the users of your TV who direct channel input.  Given that our broadcast channels are limited, the guide for now is acceptable.
• XBOX Live/Netflix – man, I can’t figure out why I can’t just have multiple XBOX consoles use my same XBOX Live account.  This is annoying.  Yes I know you can put it on a memory card, but moving upstairs/downstairs even with that is dumb.  Netflix streaming requires an XBOX Live account (Gold).  So downstairs my XBOX has that configured and we can watch streaming in all glory.  Upstairs however I can’t login to my Live account without transferring it, so that defeats the point.  This is lame in my opinion.  The PlayOn software above enables Netflix viewing, so upstairs we use PlayOn for Netflix.  The downside to the PlayOn/Netflix solution is the quality.  I see a noticeable difference in quality from direct XBOX streaming for Netflix compared to PlayOn.  This is obvious when you consider that XBOX is streaming directly, versus PlayOn is an XBOX plugin that is communicating with my computer and then streaming that.  It just simply doesn’t compare.  But is an option.
• Non-Netflix/Non-Live Watching – this involves the PlayOn software.  It is a bit hacked together from a UX experience in XBOX.  You have to navigate to your Video Library on your profile, then you navigate “folders” to view the PlayOn content.  This navigation is horrible for large ‘channels’ as they searching options are usually fixed.  It is just pretty kludge if you ask me.  I’m not sure what feeds the PlayOn channels like CBS/NBC etc, but some are recent and some are not – it’s odd, but it works…just takes some getting used to at first.  The navigation via Hulu on this is not ideal for me given the amount of content that is on Hulu.  Needless to say I use PlayOn mostly for Netflix only streaming and the occasional boredom surf for older TV episodes of crime dramas :-).
• No Gigabit – my XBOXen have no gigabit connections.  My home network is now gigabit enabled, but for the most part it is worthless.  Since I’m streaming from my Media Center PC to my XBOX for television it would be nice to have that gigabit bandwidth capability. 

We’re sticking to this configuration as it is working for us.  We are not huge TV watchers and watch mostly network broadcast only.  Because of this we haven’t lost out on our TV watching habits at all.  I miss being able to fall asleep to some Food TV shows, but I’m not heart broken over it.  I’ve had people come over and state how clear our channels are compared to even their cable HD broadcast.  They are amazed at the picture quality they see on our sets.  I have to admit, it does look better than the HD I was getting via my cable provider as well.

So 6 months into it and no regrets.  My move to “free” my be a little stretch since I had to invest in at least the HD HomeRun to make this all work (PlayOn and My Movies are not free either, but not requirement to get over-the-air HDTV).  So for my one-time investment of $200 for the HDHR and an antenna, I’m happy with my decision.