We've been making and publishing
these little MSDN "Nugget" videos in the UK for quite a while and they've been successful for us in the sense that people download them and watch them and when I meet folk at events they often say "Hey, I watched that little video" and they're generally positive about them which is great.
We've got to the point where there are around 50+ videos on the web site
here and, for me, the website has got a little bit unmanageable in that it's hard to see what's new and what the categories are and, frankly, sometimes things have been categorised incorrectly.
I wanted to try and help make the viewing of these videos a little easier so I've typed all the details of these things into a little database and made that available via a number of means;
MSDN Nugget Videos on an RSS Feed
The first mechanism is a plain reliable RSS Feed. You can consume the feed here;
This is a list of all the topics that we've recorded "Nugget" videos for. This is likely to be a fairly static list but as topics get added then the list will expand. The list contains feeds for all the videos for each particular topic so if you're interested in, say, "Windows Mobile" then there's a feed for that and as videos get added to that topic the feed will grow.
Of course, the feed that you can get out of the
MSDN Connection can do a similar job for you but it's less focused whereas these feeds are very specific to just "Nugget" videos on a particular topic.
I was viewing the feed from IE7 on Windows Vista today and I like the way that IE displays it and the way it let me navigate through to the "sub-feeds" worked brilliantly for me - makes it all look a lot more fancy than it really is.
MSDN Nugget Videos in a Smart Client Application
The second mechanism is a fairly basic Smart Client application that I've built to view the "Nugget" videos.
This requires .NET Framework V2.0 which you can get
from here.
The advantage over the web page or the RSS Feeds is that the application allows for fairly easy downloading of the Zipped videos so that you can then watch them at a later point. It also remembers which videos you've already seen and provides a feedback mechanism.
The Smart Client UI looks like this;
and it's all fairly simple in terms of operation - it tries to detect your connection state and if you're online it offers you the full list of "Nugget" videos whereas if you're offline it only offers you items that you've downloaded. You can click on any number of videos and have them downloaded serially one after the other to the local machine for offline viewing at a later point.
This is just V1.0 of the client, if it proves useful I might put a bit more work into it and make it a little more flexible in the future - more than happy to take suggestions. At the moment, the client and the services behind it are being served from this site but, again, they may move to another site if it proves popular.
If you want to install the application, it's available via ClickOnce from this URL;
A small word of warning - this application requires "Full Trust" on your machine right now. There is some unmanaged code inside the application and because of that I've not been able to deploy it over ClickOnce as a true "Internet Zone" application. If you're at all worried about that "Full Trust" security then don't install the application.
Future Mechanisms for Obtaining The Videos
I know that
Mike Ormond has been feverishly working away on an ASP.NET 2.0 control that can be embedded into a site which will display the "Nugget" videos in a way that's easy to navigate and consume. Hopefully, he'll be able to make this available via his site in a week or two so that people can take that and add it in to their own sites to make these available in as many places as possible.
I've been trying to convince him today to build a
Gadget for
Windows Live but I must admit that it's a hard argument for me to make when I know full well that, for me, writing Javascript is about as much fun as having my teeth drilled :-)
That's it for now. If you try the application, let me know what you think and whether it installs and works for you and whether you want changes (no promises but I'll certainly take a look at it).
Happy Xmas!
Posted
Fri, Dec 23 2005 3:56 PM
by
mtaulty