July 2011 – Dhananjay Kumar

Smooth Streaming on Windows Phone 7

Read Smooth Streaming in Silverlight here

This post is walkthrough on enabling smooth streaming of media over IIS and then stream over Windows Phone 7 client. There are very good documentation available on IIS official site to have a better understanding of smooth streaming. So I am not touching theoretical concept behind smooth streaming in this post. However I have shown steps by steps to enable smooth streaming of media over IIS then to stream over Windows Phone 7 client.

Essentially there are four majors steps you need to do

Enable Smooth Streaming on IIS
Encode Media File .There is a point to be noted here that Windows Phone 7 [at time of writing this post] does not support variable bit rate of streaming. It does support only VC-IIS Smooth Streaming -480 VPR ]
Publish Encoded file over IIS
Play the streamed media on Windows Phone 7 using smfPlayer.

Enable Smooth streaming on IIS

You need to download and install IIS Media Services. Go to below URL to download and install IIS Media Services.

http://www.iis.net/download/SmoothStreaming

After successful installation, you will have a section of Media Services in IIS.

Encode Media File

To encode media for IIS smooth streaming you need Microsoft Expression Encoder 4.0 pro. If you don’t have installed that then download and install that. It comes as part of Microsoft Expression.

Step 1

Very first open Microsoft Encoder Pro 4.0. You will get prompted to choose Project type to be loaded. Select Transcoding Project and press Ok.

Step 2

In this step you need to choose the media file to be encoded and streamed over IIS. Click on File in menu and select Import.

Choose media file to be encoded and streamed.

Step 3

In right side tab select Preset option. If you are unable to find Preset tab, select windows from menu and check preset.

From Preset tab select Encoding for Silverlight and then select IIS Smooth Streaming. After selecting option of IIS Smooth Streaming, you can choose VBR rate of your choice.

After IIS Smooth streaming type doesn’t forget to click Apply button.

Step 4

There are many options available for you to configure like,

Thumbnails
Security
Template options
Output path
Publish etc

You can set values for above options as per your requirement. I am going to set output path here. Make sure you have created a folder on your local derive to set as output path for the encoded media for the streaming. On my local D drive, I have created a folder called StreamDemo. So set the output path as below

Make sure to check Sub-folder by job ID. Leave Media File name as default name.

Step 5

If you have set the values for everything required then go ahead and click on the Encode button in the bottom.

You should be getting Encoding status message as below.

After successful encoding you will get encoded media playing the browser from the local derive. Now you have encoded media file.

Publish Encoded File over IIS

To stream over IIS, you need to publish encoded media over IIS. Process to publish encoded media is same as publishing any other web site over IIS.

Step 1

Open IIS as administrator and add a new web site

Step 2

In dialog box you need to provide below information

Site name: Give any name of your choice
Port : Choose any available port above 1024
Host Name : Leave it empty
Type : Http
Check the check box start web site immediately.
In Physical path, give the same location Encoded file is saved. In previous step while encoding media for streaming, I save file in location D:\StreamDEmo. So I am going to set Physical Path as D:\StreamDEmo.

Click Ok to create web site in IIS. So we created site StreamingMediaDemo1. Right click on that and select Manage Web Site and then browse.

On browsing most likely you will get forbidden error message as below,

Append Default.html in URL to play the media.

Media will be played as below,

Now append wildlife.ism/manifest to the URL. This manifest file would be used in Windows Phone 7 and other clients to stream media over IIS.

Playing in Windows Phone 7

To Play media on Windows Phone 7 download below player from the CodePlex.

http://smf.codeplex.com/releases/view/63434#DownloadId=222617

After download extract the file on locally. You will have to add references of these dll in Windows Phone project. Since dll got downloaded from the web, so they would be locked. To use them in the project right click and unblock them.

Note : I would recommend to download msi file and install that to get all the required files.

Step 1

Create a Windows Phone Application

Choose target Windows Phone version 7.0

Step 2

Right click and add the references. If you have run msi then you will get below references at the location,

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework\v2.4\Silverlight For Phone\Bin

Step 3

You need to download IIS smooth client and install from below URL.

http://www.iis.net/download/smoothclient

Step 4

Right click on Windows Phone 7 project and add reference of Microsoft.web.media.smoothstreaming.dll

To locate this file on your local drive browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\IIS Smooth Streaming Client\v1.5\Windows Phone on 64 bit machine.

Step 5

Next we need to design Silverlight page. Open MainPage.xaml and add namespace,

And add a player on the page downloaded to play stream media as below,

Eventually xaml will be as below with a textblock to display message and player

Mainpage.xaml

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
    x:Class="Streaming.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
    xmlns:Core="clr-namespace:Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Core;assembly=Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Core.Phone"
    xmlns:Media="clr-namespace:Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Core.Media;assembly=Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Core.Phone"
    xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
    xmlns:ssme="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming;assembly=Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="728" d:DesignHeight="480"
    FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
    FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}"
    Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"
    SupportedOrientations="PortraitOrLandscape"  Orientation="Landscape"
    shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True">

    <!--LayoutRoot is the root grid where all page content is placed-->
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
            <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>

        <!--TitlePanel contains the name of the application and page title-->
        <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,17,0,28">
            <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="MY APPLICATION" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>
            <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="page name" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
        </StackPanel>

        <!--ContentPanel - place additional content here-->
        <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
            <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical">
                <TextBlock Text="Streaming Media from IIS on Silverlight" Height="22" Width="266" FontSize="12" Foreground="Blue"/>
                <Core:SMFPlayer Name="strmPlayer"
                    HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
                                 Margin="0"
                                 VerticalAlignment="Stretch"/>

            </StackPanel>
        </Grid>
    </Grid>

    <!--Sample code showing usage of ApplicationBar-->
    <!--<phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>
        <shell:ApplicationBar IsVisible="True" IsMenuEnabled="True">
            <shell:ApplicationBarIconButton IconUri="/Images/appbar_button1.png" Text="Button 1"/>
            <shell:ApplicationBarIconButton IconUri="/Images/appbar_button2.png" Text="Button 2"/>
            <shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems>
                <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem Text="MenuItem 1"/>
                <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem Text="MenuItem 2"/>
            </shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems>
        </shell:ApplicationBar>
    </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>-->

</phone:PhoneApplicationPage>

Step 6

We need to write some code on page load to create play list of streamed media and play in the player.

Mainpage.xaml .cs


using System;
using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;
using Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Core.Media;


namespace Streaming
{
    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
    {
        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            PlaylistItem item = new PlaylistItem();
            item.MediaSource = new Uri("http://localhost:9173/wildlife.ism/manifest");
            item.DeliveryMethod = Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Plugins.Primitives.DeliveryMethods.AdaptiveStreaming;
            strmPlayer.Playlist.Add(item);
            strmPlayer.Play();

        }


    }
}

Step 7

Press F5 to run the application.

These were what all required to smooth stream media from IIS and play in Windows Phone 7 client. I hope this post was useful. I am looking very forward for your comments on the post. Thanks for reading Smile

Follow @debug_mode

XmlDictionary and XmlDictionaryString classes to create WCF Message

It is common when you will create Message, you may use below classes

Class	Namespace
XmlDictionary	System.Xml
XmlDictionaryString	System.Xml

Let us investigate purpose of each class one by one.

XmlDictionary class allows us to create a private pair of Key and Value. This key-value pair can be used to represent

Element name
Attribute name
XML namespace declaration.

XmlDictionary class uses XmlDictionaryString class object to create key value pair. If you see below code, we are creating a XmlDictionary object and List of XmlDictionaryString.

dct is object of XmlDictionary and while adding string value in this it returns XmlDictionaryString object.


XmlDictionary dct = new XmlDictionary();
            List<XmlDictionaryString> lstData = new List<XmlDictionaryString>();
            lstData.Add(dct.Add("Bat"));
            lstData.Add(dct.Add("Ball"));
            lstData.Add(dct.Add("Wicket"));
            foreach (var r in lstData)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Key  = {0}  and Value = {1}", r.Key, r.Value);
            }
            Console.ReadKey(true);

If you run above code you will get output as below,

We are simply adding returned XmlDictionaryString object to list of XmlDictionaryString.

I hope this post was useful. Thanks for reading Smile

Follow @debug_mode

SQL Server tip : Query a range of characters ?

If you need to query all People from Person table with FirstName start with A, you can easily query like below,

What if you want to list all the people from person table with first name start with A and B? You can combined Like operator with OR and query like below,

But imagine scenario where you need to query all the People with FirstName start with A to M. How will you do that?

Solution is you need to put like operator in the square bracket as below,

If you modify one little thing in above query and replace like operator with equal operator , you will get no error message however you will get no rows returned as well.

SQL Server Tip : . Where to use SQURE Bracket around table name?

Have you ever thought, what if your table name

1. Is exactly as of SQL Server keyword

2. Is having space in between like Student Fav Actor

If you go ahead and query against table Student Fav Actor like below, most likely you will get error message as below,

There may me one more scenario where table name is something like FROM. If you query in usual way, obviously you will be getting expected error message.

So how to query table named [However this is wrong practice to put spaces and use SQL Server keyword as table name] like above?

Very simple is the solution, put table name in square brackets.

You might encounter columns name of table are having spaces or named as keywords. In that case also you need to apply square bracket with that particular column name to work with.

Working with JavaScript in Silverlight 4.0

In this post I will show you calling of Javascript function from Silverlight. It is very simple and straight forward.

Assume you have a JavaScript function on aspx page as below,

SilverlightTestPage.aspx


<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" >
         function callmeonPageLoad() {
             alert("Hello Javascript from Silvertlight");
         }
    </script>

You want to call this Javascript function on page load of the Silverlight page then you will have to add namespace

And in the constructor of the page call it as below,

MainPage.xaml.cs


using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Browser;

namespace SilverlightApplication7
{
   [ScriptableType]
    public partial class MainPage : UserControl
    {
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            HtmlPage.RegisterScriptableObject("MainPage", this);
            HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("callmeonPageLoad");

        }
    }
}

If you notice above code you would find that MainPage is attributed with ScriptableType.

On running Silverlight application you will be getting output as below,

On your XAML if you have textbox like below,

You want to access and change value of textbox txtName in Javascript then it too is very simple. Create a function Javascript as below,

SilverlightTestPage.aspx


 <script type="text/javascript">
        function UpdatingTextBoxValue(sender)
        {

            var txtBlockFromSL = sender.FindName("txtName");
            alert(txtBlockFromSL.text);
            txtBlockFromSL.Text = "Salsa ";
            alert(txtBlockFromSL.Text);


        }
</script>

txtName is name of the Silverlight text box.

And on the page load on aspx page add a param

If you have a function in managed code and you want to access that from javacript .Assume you have function as below,

MainPage.xaml.cs



  [ScriptableMember]
       public void SilverLightFunction(string txtToUPdate)
        {
            txtName.Text = txtToUPdate;
        }

You can call this function from JavaScript as below,


 <script type="text/javascript">
        function UpdatingTextBoxValue(sender)
        {


            var host = sender.GetHost();
            host.content.MainPage.SilverLightFunction("Dhananjay");


        }
</script>

This was all about various ways to work with Silverlight and JavaScript. I hope this post was useful. Thanks for reading.