Daily Archives: September 13, 2007

internet, microsoft, multimedia, web authoring

LiveStation uses peer-to-peer, Silverlight for live TV

My final report from the UK Mix07 “Sneak peeks.” We were shown LiveStation, a Silverlight application which uses peer-to-peer technology developed by Microsoft Research to show live TV in a desktop application. Desktop and Silverlight? Yes, the app we say uses browser hosting to transform Silverlight into a desktop runtime. This is not too good for the cross-platform aspect, though it would seem possible to do the same thing with say WebKit (Safari as a component) on the Mac.

The broadcast quality was adequate for casual viewing but not great. However the player does look hassle-free to operate. Unlike the BBC’s troublesome iPlayer, this is for live TV rather than playback of previous broadcasts. Still, with both Silverlight and Flash supporting high quality video codecs, running cross-platform, and offering smooth installation with plenty of scope for interactivity, it looks like the BBC has some good options if it decides to re-examine its iPlayer technology.

The company behind LiveStation is Skinkers, which acquired peer-to-peer technology from Microsoft in exchange for a minority equity stake.

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microsoft, software development

Transactional memory draws applause at Mix07 UK

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Simon Peyton-Jones from Microsoft Research in Cambridge enthused about transactional memory during the “Sneak Peeks” session at Mix07 in the UK.

I have mentioned this before on this blog; it is also favoured by Herb Sutter as a better way to do concurrent programming.

Peyton-Jones says it will eliminate a whole class of bugs from our code; perhaps this was one reason for the warm reception for his presentation.

He is a Haskell fan, and says this is best way to experiment with transactional memory now. It is not something that can easily be introduced into other languages, but will require some radical re-engineering.

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internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

Microsoft to support PHP in Expression Web 2.0

The closing session of UK Mix07 was a “Sneak peeks” in which we were shown a variety of snippets of varying degrees of interest. One was a brief glimpse of Expression Web 2.0, Microsoft’s web design tool, showing “PHP script” on the File – New menu.

The extent of this support was not discussed. The minimum would be some level of syntax highlighting, which would be trivial to implement, so this may not amount to much. Still, it is interesting as a sign of the times. When I spoke to some folk from Zend a couple of months ago, they emphasised their IIS support and good relationship with Microsoft, so it looks as if both sides want to play nicely together.