Second Experiment with Image Classification on Windows ML from UWP (on HoloLens)

NB: The usual blog disclaimer for this site applies to posts around HoloLens. I am not on the HoloLens team. I have no details on HoloLens other than what is on the public web and so what I post here is just from my own experience experimenting with pieces that are publicly available and you should always check out the official developer site for the product documentation.

Following up from this earlier post;

First Experiment with Image Classification on Windows ML from UWP

around Windows ML;

AI Platform for Windows Developers

at the end of that previous post I’d said that I would be really keen to try the code that I’d written on HoloLens but, at the time of that post, the required Windows 10 “Redstone 4” preview wasn’t available for HoloLens.

Things change quickly these days Winking smile and just a few days later there’s a preview of “Redstone 4” available for HoloLens documented here;

HoloLens RS4 Preview

and I followed the instructions there and very quickly had that preview operating system running on my HoloLens.

The first thing that I then wanted to do was to take the code that I’d written for that previous post around WindowsML and try it out on HoloLens even though it was a 2D XAML app rather than a 3D immersive app.

My hope was that it would “just work”. Did it?

No, of course not, it’s software Smile

I ran the code inside of Visual Studio and immediately got;

Oh dear. But…I suspected that this might be because I had used Windows 10 SDK Preview version 17110 to build this app in the first place and perhaps that wasn’t going to work so well on a device that is now running a 17123.* build number.

So, I went back to the Windows Insider site and downloaded the Preview SDK labelled 10.0.17125.1000 to see if that changed things for me and I retargeted my application in Visual Studio to set its Target build to 17125 and its minimum build to 16299 before doing a complete rebuild and redeploy.

I had to set the minimum build to something below 17123 as that is what the device is now running.

Once again, I got the exact same error and so I set about trying to debug and immediately noticed that my debugger wasn’t stepping nicely and that prompted me to notice for the first time that VS had automatically selected the release build configuration and it jarred a memory in that I remembered that I had seen this exact same exception trying to run in release mode on the PC when I’d first written the code and I hadn’t figured it out putting it down to perhaps something in the preview SDK.

So, perhaps HoloLens wasn’t behaving any differently from the PC here? I switched to the debug configuration and, sure enough, the code doesn’t hit that marshalling exception and runs fine although I’m not sure yet about that ‘average time’ value that I’m calculating – that needs some looking into but here’s a screenshot of the app staring at a picture of a dachshund;

The screenshot is a bit weird because I cropped it out of a video recording and also because I’m holding up a picture of a dachshund in front of the app which is then displaying the view from its own webcam which contains the picture of the dachshund so it all gets a little bit recursive.

Here’s the app looking at a picture of an alsatian;

and it’s a little less sure about this pony;

So, for a quick experiment this is great in that I’ve taken the exact same code and the exact same model from the PC and it works ‘as is’ on these preview pieces on HoloLens Smile Clearly, I could do with taking a look at the time it seems to be taking to process frames but I suspect that’s to do with me running debug bits and/or the way in which I’m grabbing frames from the camera.

For me, it’s a bit of a challenge though to have this 2D XAML app get in the way of what the camera is actually looking at so the next step would be to see if I can put this into an immersive app rather than a 2D app and that’s perhaps where I’d follow up with a later blog post.

For this post, the code is just where it was for the previous post – nothing has changed Smile

By the way – I still don’t know what happens if I point the model at an actual dachshund/dog/pony – I need to get some of those for testing Winking smile and, additionally, I suspect that once the code is comfortable with being able to find a particular object then the next question is likely to involve locating it in the 3D scene which might involve some kind of correlation between the colour image and a depth image and I’m not sure whether that’s something that’s achievable – I’d need to think about that.

Rough Notes on UWP and webRTC (Part 4–Adding some Unity and a little HoloLens)

Following up on my previous post, I wanted to take the very basic test code that I’d got working ‘reasonably’ on UWP on my desktop PC and see if I could move it to HoloLens running inside of a Unity application.

The intention would be to preserve the very limited functionality that I have which goes something like;

The app runs up, is given the details of the signalling service (from the PeerCC sample) to connect to and it then connects to it
The app finds a peer on the signalling service and tries to get a two-way audio/video call going with that peer displaying local/remote video and capturing local audio while playing remote audio.

That’s what I currently have in the signalling branch here and the previous blog post was about abstracting some of that out such that I could use it in a different environment like Unity.

Now it’s time to see if that works out…

Getting Some Early Bits to Work With

In order to even think about this I needed to try and pick up a version of UWP webRTC that works in that environment and which has some extra pieces to help me out and, as far as I know, at the time of writing that involves picking up bits that are mentioned in this particular issue over on github by the UWP webRTC team;

Expose “raw” MediaCapture Object #11

and there are instructions in that post around how to get hold of some bits;

Instructions for Getting Bits

and so I followed those instructions and built the code from that branch of that repo.

From there, I’ve been working with my colleague Pete to put together some of those pieces with the pieces that I already had from the previous blog posts.

First, a quick look around the bits that the repo gives us…

Exploring the WebRtcUnity PeerCC Sample Solution

As is often the case, this process looks like it is going to involve standing on the shoulder of some other giants because there’s already code in the UWP webRTC repo that I pointed to above that shows how to put this type of app together.

The code in question is surfaced through this solution in the repo;

Inside of that solution, there’s a project which builds out the equivalent of original XAML+MediaElement PeerCC sample but in a modified way which here doesn’t have to use MediaElement to render and that shift in the code here is represented by its additional Unity dependencies;

This confused me for a little while – I was wondering why this XAML based application suddenly had a big dependency on Unity until I realised that what’s been done here to show that media can be rendered by Unity is that the original sample code has been modified such that (dependent on the conditional compilation constant UNITY) this app can either render media streams;

Using MediaElement as it did previously
Using Unity rendering pieces which are then hosted inside of a SwapChainPanel inside of the XAML UI.

Now, I’ve failed to get this sample to run on my machine which I think is down to the versions of Unity that I’m running and so I had to go through a process of picking through the code a little ‘cold’ but in so far as I can see what goes on here is that there are a couple of subprojects involved in making this work…

The Org.WebRtc.Uwp Project

This project was already present in the original XAML-based solution and in my mind this is involved with wrapping some C++/CX code around the webrtc.lib library in order to bring types into a UWP environment. I haven’t done a delta to try and see how much/little is different in this branch of this project over the original sample so there may be differences.

The MediaEngineUWP and WebRtcScheme Projects

Then there’s 2 projects within the Unity sample’s MediaEngine folder which I don’t think were present in the original purely XAML-based PeerCC sample;

The MediaEngineUWP and WebRtcScheme projects build out DLLs which seem to take on a couple of roles although I’m more than willing to admit that I don’t have this all worked out in my head at the time of writing but I think they are about bridging between the Unity platform, the Windows Media platform and webRTC and I think they do this by;

The existing work in the Org.WebRtc.Uwp project which integrates webRTC pieces into the Windows UWP media pipeline. I think this is done by adding a webRTC VideoSinkInterface which then surfaces the webRTC pieces as the UWP IMediaSource and IMediaStreamSource types.
The MediaEngineUWP.dll having an export UnityPluginLoad function which grabs an IUnityGraphics and offers a number of other exports that can be called via PInvoke from Unity to set up the textures for local/remote video rendering of video frames in Unity by code inside of this DLL.

There’s a class in this project named MediaEnginePlayer which is instanced per video stream and which seems to do the work of grabbing frames from the incoming Windows media pipeline and transferring them into Unity textures.
The same class looks to use the IMFMediaEngineNotify callback interface to be notified of state changes for the media stream and responds by playing/stopping etc.

The wiring together of this MediaEnginePlayer into the media pipeline is a little opaque to me but I think that it follows what is documented here and under the topic Source Resolver here. This seems to involve the code associating a URL (of form webrtc:GUID) with each IMediaStream and having an activatable class which the media pipeline then invokes with the URL to be linked up to the right instance of the player.

That may be a ‘much less than perfect’ description of what goes on in these projects as I haven’t stepped through all of that code.

What I think it does mean though is that the code inside of the WebRtcScheme project requires that the .appxmanifest for an app that consumes it needs to include a section that looks like;

 <Extensions>
    <Extension Category="windows.activatableClass.inProcessServer">
      <InProcessServer>
        <Path>WebRtcScheme.dll</Path>
        <ActivatableClass ActivatableClassId="WebRtcScheme.SchemeHandler" ThreadingModel="both" />
      </InProcessServer>
    </Extension>
  </Extensions>

I don’t know of a way of setting this up inside of a Unity project so I ended up just letting Unity build the Visual Studio solution and then I manually hack the manifest to include this section

Exploring the Video Control Solution

I looked into another project within that github repo which is a Unity project contained within this folder;

There’s a Unity scene which has a (UI) Canvas and a couple of Unity Raw Image objects which can be used to render to;

and a Control script which is set up to PInvoke into the MediaEngineUWP to pass the pieces from the Unity environment into the DLL. That script looks like this;

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.UI;

#if !UNITY_EDITOR
using Org.WebRtc;
using Windows.Media.Core;
#endif

public class ControlScript : MonoBehaviour
{
    public uint LocalTextureWidth = 160;
    public uint LocalTextureHeight = 120;
    public uint RemoteTextureWidth = 640;
    public uint RemoteTextureHeight = 480;
    
    public RawImage LocalVideoImage;
    public RawImage RemoteVideoImage;

	void Awake()
    {
    }
    
    void Start()
    {
	}

    private void OnInitialized()
    {
    }

    private void OnEnable()
    {
    }

    private void OnDisable()
    {
    }

    void Update()
    {
    }

    public void CreateLocalMediaStreamSource(object track, string type, string id)
    {
        Plugin.CreateLocalMediaPlayback();
        IntPtr nativeTex = IntPtr.Zero;
        Plugin.GetLocalPrimaryTexture(LocalTextureWidth, LocalTextureHeight, out nativeTex);
        var primaryPlaybackTexture = Texture2D.CreateExternalTexture((int)LocalTextureWidth, (int)LocalTextureHeight, TextureFormat.BGRA32, false, false, nativeTex);
        LocalVideoImage.texture = primaryPlaybackTexture;
#if !UNITY_EDITOR
        MediaVideoTrack videoTrack = (MediaVideoTrack)track;
        var source = Media.CreateMedia().CreateMediaStreamSource(videoTrack, type, id);
        Plugin.LoadLocalMediaStreamSource((MediaStreamSource)source);
        Plugin.LocalPlay();
#endif
    }

    public void DestroyLocalMediaStreamSource()
    {
        LocalVideoImage.texture = null;
        Plugin.ReleaseLocalMediaPlayback();
    }

    public void CreateRemoteMediaStreamSource(object track, string type, string id)
    {
        Plugin.CreateRemoteMediaPlayback();
        IntPtr nativeTex = IntPtr.Zero;
        Plugin.GetRemotePrimaryTexture(RemoteTextureWidth, RemoteTextureHeight, out nativeTex);
        var primaryPlaybackTexture = Texture2D.CreateExternalTexture((int)RemoteTextureWidth, (int)RemoteTextureHeight, TextureFormat.BGRA32, false, false, nativeTex);
        RemoteVideoImage.texture = primaryPlaybackTexture;
#if !UNITY_EDITOR
        MediaVideoTrack videoTrack = (MediaVideoTrack)track;
        var source = Media.CreateMedia().CreateMediaStreamSource(videoTrack, type, id);
        Plugin.LoadRemoteMediaStreamSource((MediaStreamSource)source);
        Plugin.RemotePlay();
#endif
    }

    public void DestroyRemoteMediaStreamSource()
    {
        RemoteVideoImage.texture = null;
        Plugin.ReleaseRemoteMediaPlayback();
    }

    private static class Plugin
    {
        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "CreateLocalMediaPlayback")]
        internal static extern void CreateLocalMediaPlayback();

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "CreateRemoteMediaPlayback")]
        internal static extern void CreateRemoteMediaPlayback();

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "ReleaseLocalMediaPlayback")]
        internal static extern void ReleaseLocalMediaPlayback();

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "ReleaseRemoteMediaPlayback")]
        internal static extern void ReleaseRemoteMediaPlayback();

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "GetLocalPrimaryTexture")]
        internal static extern void GetLocalPrimaryTexture(UInt32 width, UInt32 height, out System.IntPtr playbackTexture);

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "GetRemotePrimaryTexture")]
        internal static extern void GetRemotePrimaryTexture(UInt32 width, UInt32 height, out System.IntPtr playbackTexture);

#if !UNITY_EDITOR
        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "LoadLocalMediaStreamSource")]
        internal static extern void LoadLocalMediaStreamSource(MediaStreamSource IMediaSourceHandler);

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "LoadRemoteMediaStreamSource")]
        internal static extern void LoadRemoteMediaStreamSource(MediaStreamSource IMediaSourceHandler);
#endif

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "LocalPlay")]
        internal static extern void LocalPlay();

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "RemotePlay")]
        internal static extern void RemotePlay();

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "LocalPause")]
        internal static extern void LocalPause();

        [DllImport("MediaEngineUWP", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, EntryPoint = "RemotePause")]
        internal static extern void RemotePause();
    }
}

and so it’s essentially giving me the pieces that I need to wire up local/remote media streams coming from webRTC into the pieces that can render them in Unity.

If feels like across these projects are the pieces needed to plug together with my basic library project in order to rebuild the app that I had in the previous blog post and have it run inside of a 3D Unity app rather than a 2D XAML app…

Plugging Together the Pieces

Pete put together a regular Unity project targeting UWP for HoloLens and in the scene at the moment we have only 2 quads that we try to render the local and remote video to.

and then there’s an empty GameObject named Control with a script on it configured as below;

and you can see that this configuration is being used to do a couple of things;

Set up the properties that my conversation library code from the previous blog post needed to try and start a conversation over webRTC

The signalling server IP address, port number, whether to initiate a conversation or not and, if so, whether there’s a particular peer name to initiate that conversation with.

Set up some properties that will facilitate rendering of the video into the materials texturing the 2 quads in the scene.

Widths, heights to use.
The GameObjects that we want to render our video streams to.

Pete re-worked the original sample code to render to a texture of a material applied to a quad rather than the original rendering to a 2D RawImage.

Now, it’s fairly easy to then add my conversation library into this Unity project so that we can make use of that code. We simply drop it into the Assets of the project and configure up the appropriate build settings for Unity;

and also drop in the MediaEngineUWP, Org.WebRtc.dll and WebRtcScheme.dlls;

and the job then becomes one of adapting the code that I wrote in the previous blog post to suit the Unity environment which means being able to implement the IMediaManager interface that I came up with for Unity rather than for XAML.

How to go about that? Firstly, We took those PInvoke signatures from the VideoControlSample and put them into a separate static class named Plugin.

Secondly, we implemented that IMediaManager interface on top of the pieces that originated in the sample;

#if ENABLE_WINMD_SUPPORT

using ConversationLibrary.Interfaces;
using ConversationLibrary.Utility;
using Org.WebRtc;
using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.WSA;
using Windows.Media.Core;

public class MediaManager : IMediaManager
{
    // This constructor will be used by the cheap IoC container
    public MediaManager()
    {
        this.textureDetails = CheapContainer.Resolve<ITextureDetailsProvider>();
    }
    // The idea is that this constructor would be used by a real IoC container.
    public MediaManager(ITextureDetailsProvider textureDetails)
    {
        this.textureDetails = textureDetails;
    }
    public Media Media => this.media;

    public MediaStream UserMedia => this.userMedia;

    public MediaVideoTrack RemoteVideoTrack { get => remoteVideoTrack; set => remoteVideoTrack = value; }

    public async Task AddLocalStreamAsync(MediaStream stream)
    {
        var track = stream?.GetVideoTracks()?.FirstOrDefault();

        if (track != null)
        {
            // TODO: stop hardcoding I420?.
            this.InvokeOnUnityMainThread(
                () => this.CreateLocalMediaStreamSource(track, LOCAL_VIDEO_FRAME_FORMAT, "SELF"));
        }
    }

    public async Task AddRemoteStreamAsync(MediaStream stream)
    {
        var track = stream?.GetVideoTracks()?.FirstOrDefault();

        if (track != null)
        {
            // TODO: stop hardcoding I420?.
            this.InvokeOnUnityMainThread(
                () => this.CreateRemoteMediaStreamSource(track, REMOTE_VIDEO_FRAME_FORMAT, "PEER"));
        }
    }
    void InvokeOnUnityMainThread(AppCallbackItem callback)
    {
        UnityEngine.WSA.Application.InvokeOnAppThread(callback,false);
    }
    void InvokeOnUnityUIThread(AppCallbackItem callback)
    {
        UnityEngine.WSA.Application.InvokeOnUIThread(callback, false);
    }
    public async Task CreateAsync(bool audioEnabled = true, bool videoEnabled = true)
    {
        this.media = Media.CreateMedia();

        // TODO: for the moment, turning audio off as I get an access violation in
        // some piece of code that'll take some debugging.
        RTCMediaStreamConstraints constraints = new RTCMediaStreamConstraints()
        {
            // TODO: switch audio back on, fix the crash.
            audioEnabled = false,
            videoEnabled = true
        };
        this.userMedia = await media.GetUserMedia(constraints);
    }

    public void RemoveLocalStream()
    {
        // TODO: is this ever getting called?
        this.InvokeOnUnityMainThread(
            () => this.DestroyLocalMediaStreamSource());
    }

    public void RemoveRemoteStream()
    {
        this.DestroyRemoteMediaStreamSource();
    }

    public void Shutdown()
    {
        if (this.media != null)
        {
            if (this.localVideoTrack != null)
            {
                this.localVideoTrack.Dispose();
                this.localVideoTrack = null;
            }
            if (this.RemoteVideoTrack != null)
            {
                this.RemoteVideoTrack.Dispose();
                this.RemoteVideoTrack = null;
            }
            this.userMedia = null;
            this.media.Dispose();
            this.media = null;
        }
    }
    void CreateLocalMediaStreamSource(object track, string type, string id)
    {
        Plugin.CreateLocalMediaPlayback();
        IntPtr playbackTexture = IntPtr.Zero;
        Plugin.GetLocalPrimaryTexture(
            this.textureDetails.Details.LocalTextureWidth, 
            this.textureDetails.Details.LocalTextureHeight, 
            out playbackTexture);

        this.textureDetails.Details.LocalTexture.GetComponent<Renderer>().sharedMaterial.mainTexture = 
            (Texture)Texture2D.CreateExternalTexture(
                (int)this.textureDetails.Details.LocalTextureWidth, 
                (int)this.textureDetails.Details.LocalTextureHeight, 
                (TextureFormat)14, false, false, playbackTexture);

#if ENABLE_WINMD_SUPPORT
        Plugin.LoadLocalMediaStreamSource(
            (MediaStreamSource)Org.WebRtc.Media.CreateMedia().CreateMediaStreamSource((MediaVideoTrack)track, type, id));
#endif
        Plugin.LocalPlay();
    }

    void DestroyLocalMediaStreamSource()
    {
        this.textureDetails.Details.LocalTexture.GetComponent<Renderer>().sharedMaterial.mainTexture = null;
        Plugin.ReleaseLocalMediaPlayback();
    }

    void CreateRemoteMediaStreamSource(object track, string type, string id)
    {
        Plugin.CreateRemoteMediaPlayback();

        IntPtr playbackTexture = IntPtr.Zero;

        Plugin.GetRemotePrimaryTexture(
            this.textureDetails.Details.RemoteTextureWidth, 
            this.textureDetails.Details.RemoteTextureHeight, 
            out playbackTexture);

        // NB: creating textures and calling GetComponent<> has thread affinity for Unity
        // in so far as I can tell.
        var texture = (Texture)Texture2D.CreateExternalTexture(
           (int)this.textureDetails.Details.RemoteTextureWidth,
           (int)this.textureDetails.Details.RemoteTextureHeight,
           (TextureFormat)14, false, false, playbackTexture);

        this.textureDetails.Details.RemoteTexture.GetComponent<Renderer>().sharedMaterial.mainTexture = texture;

#if ENABLE_WINMD_SUPPORT
        Plugin.LoadRemoteMediaStreamSource(
            (MediaStreamSource)Org.WebRtc.Media.CreateMedia().CreateMediaStreamSource((MediaVideoTrack)track, type, id));
#endif
        Plugin.RemotePlay();
    }

    void DestroyRemoteMediaStreamSource()
    {
        this.textureDetails.Details.RemoteTexture.GetComponent<Renderer>().sharedMaterial.mainTexture = null;
        Plugin.ReleaseRemoteMediaPlayback();
    }
    Media media;
    MediaStream userMedia;
    MediaVideoTrack remoteVideoTrack;
    MediaVideoTrack localVideoTrack;
    ITextureDetailsProvider textureDetails;

    // TODO: temporary hard coding...
    static readonly string LOCAL_VIDEO_FRAME_FORMAT = "I420";
    static readonly string REMOTE_VIDEO_FRAME_FORMAT = "H264";
}
#endif

Naturally, this is very “rough” code right now and there’s some hard-coding going on in there but it didn’t take too much effort to plug these pieces under that interface that I’d brought across from my original, minimal XAML-based project.

So…with all of that said…

Does It Work?

Sort of Smile Firstly, you might notice in the code above that audio is hard-coded to be switched off because we currently have a crash if we switch audio on and it’s some release of some smart pointer in the webRTC pieces that we haven’t yet tracked down.

Minus audio, it’s possible to run the Unity app here on HoloLens and have it connect via the sample-provided signalling service to the original XAML-based PeerCC sample running (e.g.) on my Surface Book and video streams flow and are visible in both directions.

Here’s a screenshot of that “in action” from the point of view of the desktop app receiving video stream from HoloLens;

and that screenshot is display 4 things;

Bottom right is the local PC’s video stream off its webcam – me wearing a HoloLens.
Upper left 75% is the remote stream coming from the webcam on the HoloLens including its holographic content which currently includes;

Upper left mid section is the remote video stream from the PC replayed on the HoloLens.
Upper right mid section is the local HoloLens video stream replayed on the HoloLens which looked to disappear when I was taking this screenshot.

You might see some numbers in there that suggest 30fps but I think that was a temporary thing and at the time of writing the performance so far is fairly bad but we’ve not had any look at what’s going on there just yet – this ‘play’ sample needs some more investigation.

Where’s the Code?

If you’re interested in following these experiments along as we go forward then the code is in a different location to the previous repo as it’s over here on Pete’s github account;

https://github.com/peted70/web-rtc-test

Feel free to feedback but, of course, apply the massive caveats that this is very rough experimentation at the moment – there’s a long way to go Smile

Rough Notes on UWP and webRTC (Part 3)

This is a follow-on from my previous post around taking small steps with webRTC and UWP.

At the end of that post, I had some scrappy code which was fairly fixed in function in that it was a small UWP app which would use the UWP webRTC library to connect to a signalling service and then could begin a conversation with a peer that was also connected to the same signalling service.

The signalling service in question had to be the one provided with the UWP webRTC bits and the easiest way to test that my app was doing something was to run it against the PeerCC sample which also ships with the UWP webRTC bits and does way more than my app does by demonstrating lots of functionality that’s present in UWP webRTC.

The links to all the webRTC pieces that I’m referring to are in the previous 2 posts on this topic.

Tidying Up

The code that I had in the signalling branch of this github repo at the end of the previous post was quite messy and not really in a position to be re-used and so I spent a little time just pulling that code apart, refactoring some of the functionality behind interfaces and reducing the implicit dependencies in order to try and move the code towards being a little bit more re-usable (even if the functionality it currently implements isn’t of much actual use to a real user – I’m just experimenting).

What I was trying to move towards was some code that I knew sort of worked in this XAML based UWP app that I could then lift out of the app and re-use in a non-XAML based UWP app (i.e. a Unity app) so that I would have some control over the knowns and unknowns in trying out that process.

What I needed to do then was make sure that in refactoring things, I ended up with code that was clearly abstracted from its dependencies on anything in the XAML layer.

Firstly, I refactored the solution into two projects to make for a class library and an app project which referenced it;

and then I took some of the pieces of functionality that I had in there and abstracted it out into a set of interfaces;

with a view to making the dependencies between these interfaces explicit and the implementation pluggable.

This included putting the code which provides signalling by invoking the signalling service supplied with the original sample behind an interface. Note that I’m not at all trying to come up with a generic interface that could generally represent the notion of signalling in webRTC but, instead, I’m just trying to put an interface on to the existing signalling code that I took (almost) entirely from the PeerCC sample project in the UWP webRTC bits.

The other interfaces/services that I added here are hopefully named ‘reasonably well’ in terms of the functionality that they represent with perhaps the one that’s not quite so obvious obvious being the IConversationManager.

This interface is just my attempt to codify the minimum functionality that I need to bring the other interface implementations together in order to get any kind of conversation over webRTC up and running from my little sample app as it stands and that IConversationManager interface right now just looks as below;

and so the idea here is that a consumer of an IConversationManager can simply;

Tell the manager whether it is meant to initiate conversations or simply wait for a remote peer to being a conversation with it

In terms of initiating conversations – the code is ‘aggressive’ in that it simply finds the first peer that it sees provided by the signalling service and attempts to being a conversation with it.

Call InitialiseAsync providing the name that the local peer wants to be represented by.
Call ConnectToSignallingAsync with the IP Address and port where the signalling service is to be found.

From there, the implementation jumps in and tries to bring together all the right pieces to get a conversation flowing.

In making these abstractions, I found two places where I had to apply a little bit of thought and that was where;

The UWP webRTC pieces need initialising with a Dispatcher object and so I abstracted that out into an interface so that an implementation can be injected into the underlying layer.
There is a need at some point to do some work with UI objects to represent media streams. In the code to date, this has meant working with XAML MediaElements but in other scenarios (e.g. Unity UI) that wouldn’t work.

In order to try and abstract the library code from these media pieces, I made an IMediaManager interface with the intention being to write a different implementation for the different UI layers so to bring this library up inside of a Unity app I’d at least need to provide a Unity version of the highlighted implementation pieces below which are about IMediaManager in a XAML UI world;

My main project took a dependency on autofac to provide a container from which to serve up the implementations of my interfaces and I did a cheap trick of providing my own “container” embedded into the library and named CheapContainer in case the library was going to be used in a situation where autofac or some other IoC container wasn’t immediately available.

Configuration of the container then moves into my App.xaml.cs file and is fairly simple and I wrote it twice, once for autofac and once using my own CheapContainer;

#if !USE_CHEAP_CONTAINER
        Autofac.IContainer Container
        {
            get
            {
                if (this.iocContainer == null)
                {
                    this.BuildContainer();
                }
                return (this.iocContainer);
            }
        }
#endif
        void BuildContainer()
        {
#if USE_CHEAP_CONTAINER
            CheapContainer.Register<ISignallingService, Signaller>();
            CheapContainer.Register<IDispatcherProvider, XamlMediaElementProvider>();
            CheapContainer.Register<IXamlMediaElementProvider, XamlMediaElementProvider>();
            CheapContainer.Register<IMediaManager, XamlMediaElementMediaManager>();
            CheapContainer.Register<IPeerManager, PeerManager>();
            CheapContainer.Register<IConversationManager, ConversationManager>();
#else
            var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
            builder.RegisterType<Signaller>().As<ISignallingService>().SingleInstance();

            builder.RegisterType<XamlMediaElementProvider>().As<IXamlMediaElementProvider>().As<IDispatcherProvider>().SingleInstance();

            builder.RegisterType<XamlMediaElementMediaManager>().As<IMediaManager>().SingleInstance();
            builder.RegisterType<PeerManager>().As<IPeerManager>().SingleInstance();
            builder.RegisterType<ConversationManager>().As<IConversationManager>().SingleInstance();
            builder.RegisterType<MainPage>().AsSelf().SingleInstance();
            this.iocContainer = builder.Build();
#endif
        }
#if USE_CHEAP_CONTAINER
#else
        Autofac.IContainer iocContainer;
#endif

and the code which now lives inside of my MainPage.xaml.cs file involved in actually getting the webRTC conversation up and running is reduced down to almost nothing;

        async void OnConnectToSignallingAsync()
        {
            await this.conversationManager.InitialiseAsync(this.addressDetails.HostName);

            this.conversationManager.IsInitiator = this.isInitiator;

            this.HasConnected = await this.conversationManager.ConnectToSignallingAsync(
                this.addressDetails.IPAddress, this.addressDetails.Port);
        }

and so that seems a lot simpler, neater and more re-usable than what I’d had at the end of the previous blog post.

In subsequent posts, I’m going to see if I can now re-use this library inside of other environments (e.g. Unity) so as to bring this same (very limited) webRTC functionality that I’ve been playing with to that environment.

Mike Taulty

I do some developer stuff for Microsoft UK

Category: XAML