As a Microsoft Regional Director I’m often prepared to stick my head out and stir a bit of shit. One of the things I’ll often bleat about is the appearance of Flash on Microsoft properties. It therefore behooves me to put my money where my mouth is and deliver up great Silverlight sites ourselves.

In the past we’ve done some really cool ‘hardcore’ Silverlight projects that we’ve shown of at events like Mix. These include TextGlow and Buttercup. This time around we’ve delivered a Silverlight based site to help support the Technical Preview of Office 2010.

http://www.office2010themovie.com

It’s 100% Silverlight and I’m not going to go into the technical details as a bunch of the team (linked below) will be doing that.

We kicked around the idea of using Silverlight 3.0 for this project- we knew the ship date and given that it was just three days before our go-live we decided that we’d err on the side of caution. This really comes down to the adoption of the plugin; Silverlight 2.0 has pretty good adoption, particularly among our target demographic but 3 days just isn’t long enough to get the number of plugin installs up to a decent level. At the end of the day whether your running with Flash or Silverlight you are making a trade-off between plugin availability and functionality even if just choosing between versions on the one platform.

We’re running Silverlight streaming. The video clips that are coming from the production company are have fantastic production values: certainly make me jealous. It would be a shame to stick them in a nasty grainy low bitrate codec but at the same time we’re catering to a global audience. Silverlight Steaming means that we can delivery a good experience for everyone around the world and then for those of us with great internet connections (thanks Telstra Clear cable!) we can deliver a full 720p HD stream in the same UI. We worked with iStreamPlanet who are providing the streaming services over the LimeLight CDN.

The main application is hosted in the Rackspace Texas data center. It just wasn’t practical to run this out of the Intergen Wellington data center in the short time frame we were working to. The backend platform is, unsurprisingly, Microsoft server products: Win2k8 and SQL2k8.

So there you have it. Money where my mouth is I think you’ll agree.

Links to posts from the team:
James Newton-King who built out the server side technology and headed up our release management blogs on more of the technical details: http://james.newtonking.com/archive/2009/07/14/backstage-with-office-2010-website-live.aspx

Aaron Hall from our Dunedin Office jumped on the Tin Budgie and spent 2 weeks in Wellington working on the mobile version (visit it on your WinMo or iPhone device): http://aaronhall.co.nz/Blog.aspx?BlogTopic=Microsoft#Backstage with Microsoft 2010

Chris Klug who lead the Silverlight development side of things: http://chris.59north.com/post/www-office2010themovie-com-is-now-live.aspx Chris also has some tips we learnt along the way…. in fact make that Chris has crap load of great technical deep dive content that I emplore you to go and read so you can learn from our experience.

I’ll call out the rest of the team as they blog or tweet about this.

Roger Wong one of the people on our 48 Hour Film Comp team has posted up some behind the scenes photos. One of the things about shooting a full film with 5D MkII cameras is you inevitably end up with some great photos too.

We’re not allowed to post the video online until the finalists are announced. But I promise I’ll get it up here ASAP after that. Currently we only have a Standard Definition (stupid rules) cut but we’re hoping to remaster it in full HD too.

You might recognize ‘Dr Phil’ from 22 seconds into the new Air New Zealand Advert. What a tough job!

Horst and Carlos, our erstwhile directors.

D. McG. who composed our original score.

Collaborative editing.

No I love living in Wellington. We have TelstraClear Cable for 10MB internet and we have Citylink which both prod buttock.

On the weekend Citylink fell over..... Ouch!

TAB & Metservice were completely knocked offline, TradeMe & Stuff had over 25% of customers unable to reach them.

 The TAB’s punters couldn’t use the website for the whole day leading up to the game – that’s got to drive those customers away from that business channel. 

 “The MetService's weather website went down for six hours as a result of the CityLink failure…"CityLink went down and our backup link was overloaded by other similarly affected companies."

(http://www.stuff.co.nz/4229049a28.html)

 In contrast, Intergen customers were completely unaffected* thanks to our multiple physical connections to the interweb (Citylink & a dedicated fibre link directly to AT&T).

*Of course if the customer relied on Citylink for their Internet they'd have issues.

The team @ Intergen (Simon 'Skip' Gardiner of Kognition fame was the project lead) have been beavering away recently on an Open Source application for parsing and reporting on IIS log files.

It's called IIS Log Analyzer and it shows how easy it is to use the Office Open XML file formats to do document generation.

While the application is hosted inside Excel (by way of Visual Studio Tools for Office) all the document generation is done with plain old XML generation and some help from the .NET packaging APIs.

OOXML really does open up a wealth of additional options for doing document generation really easily.

Check it out here:

http://www.codeplex.com/IISAnalyzer

So we've had a team @ Intergen hard @ work for the past 6 moths putting together a fantastic new service offering that we're going to take global.

It's called ActionThis and it's basically a platform for getting things done. I can't say much more than that in terms of detail... but in the abstract here's a few things it is (grab your Buzzword Bingo Card)....

• It's web 2.0. It has AJAX, simple graphic elements and all that Web 2.0 jazz.... yes. It looks like sex!
• It's Software as a Service with a twist... think more Picasa meets Flickr meets Live Spaces... but in an entirely different problem domain... that I'm not going to tell you about.
• It's going to be a platform- you'll be able to build stuff that bolts into ActionThis and help people get stuff done.

I'll probably dribble a bit more information out here before we begin yelling from the rooftops (i.e. go public with an announcement) but, if you want to be the first in the know and the first to get your hands on the bits... you should head to http://www.actionthis.com/ and sign up for our Beta news...