Here’s a letter I just wrote to the Arizona Senators and Representatives that voted on the H.R. 1424, economic ‘bailout’ plan.  Here’s their contact information as well if you need it:

• Jon Kyl, Senator
• John McCain, Senator
• Rick Renzi, 1st District
• Trent Franks, 2nd District
• John Shadegg, 3rd District
• Ed Pastor, 4th District
• Harry Mitchell, 5th District
• Jeff Flake, 6th District
• Raul Grijalva, 7th District
• Gabrielle Giffords, 8th District

One a note, even though I’m not a member of other districts I wanted to send it to them.  Apparently you aren’t allowed to.  I’m hoping Jeff Flake will pass it along to them.  Their web sites state:

“Regrettably, I am unable to reply to email from constituents outside of the 2nd District of Arizona.”

Cool, just be sure not to run for election in the 6th District, jerk.  Anyway, here is the letter:

I’m disgusted by the additions to the bill.  I think maybe something should have been done, but appalled at the back door actions of politicians.

Lately I’ve been putting more design thoughts onto paper.  I used to try to prototype in HTML a lot, but it just got too easy to draw it out.  I liked the feel of being ‘less tech’ when it came to mockups, etc.  I was turned on to this program recently called Balsamiq Mockups.  It is a software program that basically allows you to quickly mock up web/software designs using wire-frame elements. 

I know there are other methods (please post your favorites in the comments), but there is something about this product that makes me like it a lot.  My only complaint is the use of Comic Sans :-).  The author has done a good job of providing a suite of draggable elements that would make up most any web site/application.  I’ve been using it in design thoughts around my blog site here for Subtext, as well as other Silverlight mockups I’ve been playing around with. 

What is cool is that the author provides several ways of getting individual licenses for Balsamiq.  One of them is if you are a contributor on an open source project or doing work for a non-profit.  The web site specifically states:

“If you are a do-gooder of any sort (non-profit, charity, open-source contributor, you get the idea), email me with a short blurb and I'll send you a license, FREE of charge.”

Very cool to see that kind of ‘giving back’ to the community.  I wrote to Peldi and requested a license for working on the various open source projects I’m involved with and received a license very quickly (the licensed version allows you to save/export). 

I find it to be a helpful tool in the toolbox for doing very, very quick mockups for thoughts.  It exports to a PNG file so you can share with others as well.  Share your stories of wire-framing and mockups!

When working with data and Silverlight there has often been the questions of wondering why when a service call fails that Silverlight returns the HTTP 404 status code.  In fact I’ve written about troubleshooting those types of issues in the past and tools you can use to help investigate some problems.

Still people mostly ask "if there is an exception, why is Silverlight telling me ‘not found’ instead of sending me the exception?'”  Eugene Osovetsky from the connected systems team aims to answer those questions in a recent post with a little more detail than has been provided in the past as well as offering some suggestions.  From his post, this is one of the main reasons which I’ve echoed in discussions, webcasts, forums in the past as well:

“Unfortunately, web browsers have a limitation with regards to status codes: When a browser plugin (such as Silverlight) makes an HTTP request, and the response status code is not 200, the browser hides the actual status code and the message body from the plugin. All Silverlight knows is that "something went wrong", but it has no way of discovering any details.”

Take a look at Eugene’s post for some other helpful suggestions.

You may be reading the title and wondering what is MediaStreamSource?  MediaStreamSource is a piece of the Silverlight runtime that removes a the influence of a media file's container, giving developers direct access to APIs for manipulating encoded elementary audio and video streams.

Huh?

Basically it can enable you as the developer to implement file parsers/etc. in managed code instead of Silverlight, enabling support beyond the native built-in formats for media.  There hasn’t been much information about these types of topics, and I’d agree that for the mainstream, they may be a bit more advanced media scenarios for when the default containers and formats aren’t enough for your use.  Outside of the MSDN documentation there hasn’t really been any good samples of this use either.

Until now.

One of the program managers on the Silverlight media team, Larry Olson, has just provided a detailed public sample of the MediaStreamSource in action on the MSDN Code Gallery site.  He calls the effort ManagedMediaHelpers.  The project contains:

• Silverlight class library (MediaParsers) which has helper classes for working with MP3 files, including being able to find the right point in an MP3 to begin playback.
• Silverlight test project for NUnit
• Silverlight class library (Mp3MediaStreamSource) which has logic for using MP3 file streams
• Silverlight Application Demo which shows the interaction between a MediaElement and a MediaStreamSource

Why would you want this?  Larry outlines in the project:

“For one thing, having access to elementary streams means that developers can now implement scenarios that other solutions haven't necessarily provided thus far. One example of this is adaptive streaming or multi-bitrate support as was seen during the 2008 Olympics.

For another reason, having access to elementary streams allows developers to implement scenarios that the Silverlight runtime hasn't had a chance to implement yet or that the runtime might not be able to implement in the same timeframe that a developer wants it. Examples of this could be, RTSP:T protocol support, SHOUTcast protocol support, seamless audio looping, ID3 v1 and ID3 v2 metadata support, and many other scenarios.”

This is a great sample and source for those working with media within Silverlight.  Right now it is audio only, MP3 support, but gives you an idea of the MediaStreamSource API and functionality you could implement.

I’ve gotten a few questions (including a great comment) about needing to install Silverlight under offline or administrative-restricted environments.  There are two ways you can install this.

First, you’ll still need the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio installer.  Next, make sure you download the Silverlight Developer Runtime (Windows).  There is a Mac runtime for developers as well, but if you are wanting to install the developer tools for Visual Studio offline, I’m guessing you are on Windows :-).

Okay, here’s the two options.  These really should only be done if you need an offline install experience.  If you don’t, let the installer do the work it needs please.  These instructions are for RC0 runtime at this time only. UPDATE: These also work for RTW.

Option 1 – Extract and Paste

Open a command-line window and navigate to where you downloaded the silverlight_tools.exe (Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio) file.  Run this command:

   1: silverlight_tools.exe /x

This should bring up a window like this:

Choose a location where you want the installer files to be extracted.  Make note of that path :-).  Now take the Silverlight_Developer.exe file you downloaded (Silverlight Developer Runtime) and put it in the folder where you just extracted the tools bits.

Now from the extracted folder, run SPInstaller.exe and the setup should run through installing the developer runtime and all the other required tools for development.

Option 2 – Put the Silverlight Developer Runtime in Temp

The second option still requires you to have both files, but you don’t have to extract the files from the tools installer.  It involves putting the developer runtime in your current Temp directory.  How do I know what my current temp directory is?  Again, open a command window and type:

   1: cd %TEMP%

This should navigate you your current Temp directory.  Now that you are in this directory, create a directory called “Silverlight Tools RTW” – you can use your command window to do this by typing:

   1: mkdir "Silverlight Tools RTW"

Now copy the Silverlight_Developer.exe file into that newly created folder and run the silverlight_tools.exe installer file.  This should get you the developer runtime installed and then the remaining tools.

I hope this helps some get over any admin/offline hump you may be experiencing.