Duncan Mackenzie.NET

Aug 29 […]

When I joined my current team, it was called the Channel 9 dev team, because Channel 9 was the big site that they had built and was the center of all of their efforts. You certainly wouldn’t have known that from how we spent the last two years though :) We built a whole new code base for a video bl […]

We recently had Donovan West (LiveGadgets.net) build us a set of sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista. These gadgets use the RSS feeds from each site and let you see all of our new content as it gets posted, then (using Silverlight) you can even play our videos right there on your desktop.   Yo […]

Adam Kinney, Silverlight dude and my colleague at work, has released an updated version of his Xbox Friends Watch gadget and a new standalone gamercard gadget for your website that uses Silverlight 2.0. […]

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the […]

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great […]

I'm part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I've been thinking about mobile interfaces lately... so I'm trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface... one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 […]

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The auto inclusion of all our CSS files has finally become too annoying. We'll still use the app_theme directory, as it is a handy way to store our stuff... but I'm really hoping to not set the theme, and to add the appropriate CSS for the situation (mobile vs desktop for example) while also […]

My team builds a fair number of community sites including Channel 8 (for Students), TechNet Edge (for IT Pros), Channel 10 (for enthusiasts, power […]

I'm very excited about it... really! I just got distracted on http://sitemaps.org and ended up building a site map for this site... real brute force, just grabbed all the blog entries and tags and output the appropriate absolute paths into some objects that I then wrote out into an XML document. Sam […]

and the Group Manager of Platform Evangelism at Adobe feels the need to comment about it. […]

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very […]

In an interview with Adam Kinney on Channel 9 today, Sampy goes over how the player works and why using the JavaScript and templates from Expression Media Encoder saved us a bunch of hassle […]

A few of my friends and co-workers have jumped on the FeedBurner bandwagon, and I've been pretty impressed with the stats they've been gathering. I'm not willing to send […]

Continuing on in the same pattern as my last post, adding Soapbox support to C9's forums, Adam Kinney bugged me a bit and I went ahead and added support for Silverlight Streaming as well. It will be interesting to see if (or more accurately, how long before) someone turns this to malicious p […]

In the new code that we are building for Channel 9, we have a few HTML popups here and there... floating divs for user info being one example. At the same time as we've been adding that feature, we also moved from using Windows Media Player to using Silverlight as our video player. […]

Saw this today (it is over a year old though) on Roger Hartford's blog; […]

Hey folks, I work as the dev lead for Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online and other sites. We build community sites for Microsoft using video, audio and text blogging and we build them using the latest .NET technologies. If you are into web development, if you have a passion for design and user experi […]

We (the dev team behind Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online, and others...)been doing scrum-ish development for a few sprints now, but we recently switched to using eScrum. This is a set of templates and tools for use with Team Foundation Server and it really rocks. There are few less-than-polished el […]

A friend of mine has written this google gadget in true mashup style... it uses an API from Feedburner, a service to produce the graphics, and works async to update itself right in the browser ... and produces a sweet little graphic about your current # of subscribers. […]

Kent's blog is back online and in one of his recent posts he updates us on all the projects he's been working since he left Microsoft (where we were both working at MSDN as content strategists)... tons of cool stuff, definitely worth reading through and following some links. […]

Darn script removing code on AOL! One woman, Nicolle, has a blog with AOL, but it won't let her add script to any part of the UI... or even into a post. […]

My wife is going to be in the 3-Day walk for Breast Cancer and I thought it might be useful to build a widget to display your donation info on a website. So if you are going to walk in the event, or if you know someone who is, then you might be interested in this.   To get this    Jus […]

This keeps happening to me on Microsoft sites, and it really bugs me... […]

Great little post today, something that makes perfect sense but I've never heard it before...

While working on a certificate issue for the 'next' iteration of on10.net, I decided to code up a new feature that has been sitting on our feature list for quite some time. ASX files are very simple files that let you list out a series of media files and Windows Media Player will happily play them […]

One of my jobs over the past couple of weeks has been to build a javascript based 'toolbar' that could run across the top of on10.net and show folks headlines aggregated from a variety of Microsoft Community sites. So, along with a bunch of help from Adam and Erik, I managed to get it finished and d […]

I love Winnipeg, but it doesn't normally get all that many developer focused talks... so if you live there and you are interested in .NET based web development, you should really get down to this event. […]

Some people have great ideas, like Tom Werner's Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) site... a single place on the web to upload an avatar that any blog software can then retrieve using a fairly easily constructed URL. Neat stuff, I think I'll add it to my site. […]

This time we are shipping the latest update to Microsoft 10, fun stuff... and an example of exactly how far from normal our team can be.

I think we have a real design flaw here... one of those 'neat ideas on your dev box' that maybe shouldn't have really been implemented. […]

For quite some time I've thought Pageviews were a mostly useless number to be tracking for any web site. This was very clear at MSDN, where such stats are tracked very carefully... spreadsheets are created... charts are made... and yet, none of us really believed in the Pageview #s. Instead we used […]

Not that it affects you, the reader, all that much... but I'm getting around 9000 spam comments a day now. It is crazy. I'd add code to avoid them, but I'm just finishing up a move to some new blog software that Adam and I wrote (you can see it running on Adam's site already) and I don't really want […]

I even got to be the 'preview' image! Check this out to hear a bit more about our design and implementation of on10.net, and for some more info on our plans around on10.net going forward and for moving Channel 9 on to […]

This one appears to be a bit special, as we are labeling it 1.0, which I guess means the site up until now was in Beta... I had no idea :)

Kent points us to a free ASP.NET control that pretties up any source code you output to your site... most systems I've used convert the code into html, but this one lets you leave it in its proper form (for downloading or copying to the user's clipboard) and does the coloring at runtime. […]

Is it just me, or are urls from .info a nearly certain sign of spam? I'm considering making a .info address a high indicator for spam in some of my web site code, thoughts?

Erik extended our tag pages on on10.net a bit, check out the full details here as part of our on10.net news blog.

I wrote my own for Trackbacks, which I used to incorporate trackbacks into http://on10.net, but Geoff provides one on his blog (that doesn't appear to support comments, but does support trackbacks, so I thought I had better blog about it to thank him) that does both. Silly me, I hadn't built pingba […]

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

the site is live that is... well, so are we... anyway... the real code for http://on10.net is up and running! We know about a few issues, but in general it is ready to rock, so feel free to shoot on over and grab your userid before all the good ones are gone :) […]

With their SDK, search results as RSS, and ability to limit searches by site (so you can do queries like MSDN site:duncanmackenzie.net), I think I'll be able to provide a nice little 'cross property' search for my blog and my personal site. Replacing the google search box on my site isn't a big prio […]

I run Windows Server 2003 as my dev server at work, so I'm used to having the ability to run multiple web sites (main branch on 80, debug build on 88, another project on 8080, etc... ) in fact, I'm not just used to it... I'm spoiled by it. I don't like developing or debugging in a vroot, when I know […]

I love this... and the funny thing was, I had just finished searching MSN for "Phil Ringnalda" (because I had forgotten his URL, well actually because I kept spelling his name wrong when I typed it as a URL) without much success. […]

Ok, so I must admit that the whole Live.com/Start.com thing looks so much like a "Digital Dashboard" (anyone else get into that fad when it was cool?) that I feel like I'm back working on building my own components into the Outlook Today page.... but cynicism aside, it is still a cool idea and the v […]

I've been working on some feed support in MSDN's new online platform (a beta of which is running http://msdn2.microsoft.com) and I had to decide what content-type to use when outputting a RSS feed. I knew this was a contentious issue in the past, but I thought it might have been resolved so I did so […]

Matthew mentions in response to an earlier post that my site might be broken for people using the IE 7 Beta ... I don't have IE 7 installed, because I thought I should really be testing any of my work projects in IE 6 (along with Firefox and Opera), but if anyone else has it on their machine, could […]

I've been trying to fix some XHTML issues on my blog, but two pieces of technology are thwarting my plans.... first, there is the text editor in .Text (FreeTextBox) which appears to be making the first anchor or image tag in the post uppercase, even though I have its XHTML support enabled... (so my […]