Tonight I reached a new milestone on my current development for my portal Tech Head Brothers.

You might know, or guessed, from one of my last post; “Tech Head Brothers Silverlight Streaming framework“ that I am working on adding Silverlight Streaming to Tech Head Brothers. I first released a little framework to ease the development against the REST API of Silverlight Streaming. Now I went further on with a first vertical slice of the whole solution.

The solution is composed of four parts:

  1. a client application to post the video
  2. a service to receive the posted video
  3. an admin web application to publish the video
  4. a web interface to display the video

After quite some discussions with Mathieu about the best posting user experience for the different authors we finally decided that using Live Writer was the best solution! And now that I have the first vertical slice I am really happy about the choice we made, because it makes the solution easy for the authors but also for us implementing the solution.

The client application customize Live Writer with a SmartContentSource plugin letting the author upload it’s video to Silverlight Streaming but also posting all information to Tech Head Brothers as a blog post.

The cool point here is that during the development of innoveo solutions website; my new company, I wrote a generic blog engine that basically let you define a blog just by adding an httphandler and implementing a Converter class:

Definition of a new blog, that will be used in the httpHandlers part of the web.config

<span style="color: rgb(0,0,255)">public</span> <span style="color: rgb(0,0,255)">class</span> <span style="color: rgb(43,145,175)">VideoBlog</span> : <span style="color: rgb(43,145,175)">GenericBlog</span><<span style="color: rgb(43,145,175)">Video</span>>
{
    <span style="color: rgb(0,0,255)">public</span> VideoBlog() : <span style="color: rgb(0,0,255)">base</span>(<span style="color: rgb(0,0,255)">new</span> <span style="color: rgb(43,145,175)">VideoBlogAssembler</span>())
    {
    }
}

Definition of the converter class, converting an business entity to/from a Post

<span style="color: rgb(0,0,255)">public</span> <span style="color: rgb(0,0,255)">class</span> <span style="color: rgb(43,145,175)">VideoBlogAssembler</span> : <span style="color: rgb(43,145,175)">IBlogAssembler</span><<span style="color: rgb(43,145,175)">Video</span>>
{


    <span style="color: rgb(128,128,128)">///</span><span style="color: rgb(0,128,0)"> </span><span style="color: rgb(128,128,128)"><summary>

/// Converts the specified video.
 ///
/// The video.
 ///
public Post Convert(Video video)
{
Post post = new Post();

        post.dateCreated = video.PublishDate;
        post.description = video.Description;

…

The admin part was quick to develop just extending the page I already had for articles publication.

And finally Mathieu did a great job on the XAML Silverlight Player and all the javascript part that I juste needed to integrate.

So now you know it, yeah we are adding Video to Tech Head Brothers and I hope really soon.