Ok.. I'm at TechED SEA. I'm resting and preparing for my sessions today. I plan to let go and start enjoying all the exitement from tomorrow. I'm doing 2 sessions here - SQL2005 VLDBs and XPS. I'm a SQL guy - so the SQL session is understandable. XPS!!!

Well XPS is another data storage format. There are some very nice things about teh format. To begin with it zips all the content into a single file. More important is its concepts of parts and relationships. It allows any file to be broken into multiple pieces and be assembled together. This enables endless possibilities -

• A video broken into multiple parts and associated with text and images
• A complex document like a medical record with XRays, notes, prescriptions all integrated into a single document
• An issues tracking note with the entire history built into the same file.
• A PO with internal notes built into the doc.

With Office 2007 based on the new document formats and XPS adding support for document security and rights management, its looks set to be the defacto standard on the Microsoft platform (at the very least). More on my sessions once I'm done with them.

After searching around and gathering information, I now have a sample in C# that can access the TVTuner card and I can navigate channels, record programs etc. This is a nice start. A lo of the future work would be media related - and so I'm exited about getting this start into that whole domain. I know that this opens up a lot of new avenues of thought on using media.

I get the feel that this is only the tip of the iceberg. With Vista adding more video capabilities, media related work would surely increase. This is not so much technical but more from a business context. As outsourcing increases, there is only so much that we can communicate by words and text. We need to start sharing images, audio and video too. Thus more data would transition to video formats.One of the first niches that this would be apparent in is in the training and education industry. Being an inherent knowledge industry, sharing of video would become imperetive in this space.

This work comes on the eve of my trip to TechEd Malaysia. There I'm speaking on XPS. One of the things that I want to explore in this meantime is the options of media storage in XPS formats. Here we would primarily be concerned about compression ratios and about breaking the media into smaller chunks of data. If we can then take the XPS formats and store that in Sharepoint EFFECTIVELY, that would be a nice beggining of a media storage an and indexing service.

Looking forward to my Trip to TechED SEA.

I have been trying to dabble with MCE for the last few days. Firstly Vista build 5472 refused to detect my TVTuner card (ASUS 7134). Luckily I found FLY200TV that detected the drivers. Thus I realised that the issue is not with the drivers, but with MCE. So I put that on hold and went ahead with the rest of my exploration.

I next downloaded a few MCE samples and I also have the MCE SDK for Vista build 5472 plugged into my C# Express. I now have a dev environment where I can create some samples and play around with it.

OK. So this is where I'm getting stuck. The process for working with MCE is to do one of the following - Create an AddIn into the MCE environment, or work on MCML. What I've still not been able to figure out is how to integrate this into the MediaCenter so that I can invoke these commands from there.

More posts as I traverse along this...