Archives for November 2009

Win a Visual Studio 2008 Pro License Promoting @VSTricks on Twitter in your own words

DSC01160Recently I have been getting a lot of positive feedback for my work around the Visual Studio tricks. I try to make the video tricks under 90 seconds, and while the original Video Tips were a replay on Sara Ford’s original tips, I’m ramping up to get the tips out starting for the new Visual Studio 2010.

When a new tip is released, the RSS feed is updated, and the twitter feed for @VSTricks is updated. Those are the only two traffic sources. Well the search engines pick it up also, so eventually traffic will come from organic search, but the same day traffic comes from the RSS and Twitter. The Visual Studio tricks do take a long time to put together, and a lot of people like them. Well I get a lot of positive feedback, so I’m assuming they are favorable to many thousands that view, and don’t leave comments. It is a community project, and at the end of the day, it’s just me, a single blogger putting these together.

With this in mind, I would like to do a promotion. I have an extra copy of a licensed Visual Studio Professional 2008. Not an academic, but a full version. It is a Not for Resale, so you can’t win it, and expect to get anything out of it, other than the great usage of the software.

So how do you play? How do you win?

To Play. Just promote the twitter account @VSTricks on your twitter feed to your friends. Use your own words and talk about @VSTricks, and how it’s been helpful to you. Maybe link to your favorite video trick. Whatever, it’s up to you. My goal here is simple, build the list of users following @VSTricks.

To Win. I will gather all the user names, that mention @VSTricks in their twitter feed between now and Dec 4th at noon my time, GMT-7. I’ll take all the user names into excel and scramble them, many, many, many times. This process will be recorded, and posted online, so you’ll know the winner is purely random.

The @VSTricks account will notify the winner, and I’ll ship the disk wit the serial number to an address supplied by the winner.

I’m really hoping to keep things simple, promote the twitter account @VSTricks, and at the same time give-a-way some great software to someone that could really use it. If the winner does in fact not need the software (maybe the winner already owns a copy???), I’ll fall back to the second randomly picked winner, and then third, forth, fifth and so on.

UPDATE: Dec 10th, 2009 A winner has been picked, and the video shows all. Who entered (all 17 of you), how it was random, and the announcement being made in TweetDeck 🙂 Isn’t video great?

Screencast video hosting services compared

Running the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks video blog, I have a lot of screen casts to share. In order to do this, I need to host the videos somewhere. When you think video, first you think of YouTube, at least I do. But there are other options, that are also free, or close to free, and I’m trying them all (or as many as I can).

Because the Video Tips/Tricks are pretty bandwidth heavy, I’m looking for low cost video hosting options. Maybe there are others, but I’ve narrowed my hosting choices down to …

  • Silverlight Streaming
  • Amazon Cloud Front
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo.com
  • Screencast.com

You know, I say they’re bandwidth heavy, but let’s put that into perspective. The screen casts range in size from 5mb to 100mb. Today, in most parts of the world, that is no longer bandwidth heavy. An hour long HD movie can easily turn into Gigs and Gigs of space, so maybe I’m putting too much weight on my bandwidth constraints.

Currently all of my video blog video sources are hosted on both Silverlight Streaming, and Amazon Cloud Front. I’ve posted a few on YouTube, but until recently I couldn’t figure out the magic of HD on YouTube, so YouTube wasn’t originally an option. Now I’m kind of stuck, because the original content wasn’t recorded to the YouTube spec, and they just look crappy.

So Below, I’ll divide this post into two parts. First, a pro/con list of each of the services I’m considering, followed by an embedded player from the service, if there is one.

Silverlight Streaming …

If I could have my way, I would change nothing. As I mentioned the video’s are currently being served from Silverlight Streaming. And while there is no termination date, Microsoft has announced that the Silverlight Streaming services are not going to be around forever, and they’re recommending moving away from the service. Surprisingly (and confusing to me …) is that as of today (Nov, 2009) you can still sign up for a free account, with 10gig of storage space. I would think that if the service is going away, they would not be accepting new accounts. But, that’s another story …

Amazon Cloud Front …

This really shouldn’t be in the list, but since it’s part of my current solution I’m throwing it out there. This is just a storage service. Nothing more. Could be SkyDrive, Box.net, or any Hosting company like DiscountASP.net. In several instances the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming services has been out of service, so I was throwing the video content up on the Amazon Cloud. The video player that I’m using is a custom Silverlight player, and the only thing I really need is a URL to the WMV file. So in reality, I don’t even need a video hosting solution, just a hosting solution. The problem with the hosting is that it usually comes along with a pay for usage. I’m not against paying for bandwidth, but if there are better services, I’m up for not paying as well 🙂

Vimeo …

Also, Vimeo is a contender. I’ve paid the $60/annual for their premium account, but Vimeo re-encodes the video content and it just doesn’t have the clarity of the original screen capture. You’ll see in the content comparison below, that the quality is MUCH better than event the YouTube HD, but it’s still not close to the original recoding. If I was not recording screen captures, I think Vimeo would be my winner because of the quality. But because my video content is almost always under 100mb in size, I’m looking for perfect quality, which Video doesn’t give me since it goes through a magical re-encoding process.

YouTube …

My biggest problem with YouTube is the pre-production that needs to be done. I really have to jump through hoops to get the content recorded properly, so that after the video is uploaded, it can be rendered in HD. In order to embed the video on my site, I’ve decided that the perfect content size is 900X480. This video size is not conducive to HD playback. I don’t care about the size, this isn’t going to DVD or ever mean to be played on a television. It’s meant to be played on ScottCate.com. Now, the argument could be made that YouTube has enough traffic that I should bend over backwards to get the content uploaded. The argument goes … maybe it would be worth the extra troubles just to get a YouTube channel. So if I chose YouTube, I’m still stuck with looking for a solution for the original content I have, that isn’t YouTube render friendly. YouTube also has not-so-easy sizing options. If I want to play the video back at a certain size, I can’t, unless it lines up with the players they choose. I’m sure this could be hacked, but I don’t wanna think that much about it, just work for me please!

TechSmith Screencast.com …

I record all the content using Camtasia from TechSmith.com. They offer a nice solution of hosting the video output on ScreenCast.com. The premium service is $99 a year, which is well within my “Cheap enough for blogging” price point. A nice part of ScreenCast.com is that there are output options baked into the Camtasia product to upload the final product. In fairness, the product has uploads built for other services, and FTP, and I even think they can be customized to any service. Also, ScreenCast.com doesn’t re-encode the uploaded content, it just streams it out.

And the winner is …

Screencast.com! After typing all this, and thinking about my real problem, I’ve realized that what I need isn’t a video hosting solution to save on bandwidth costs. What I really need is a hosting service that doesn’t re-encode the content that I upload. With that, all I really need is any old hosting service right? But, once you couple the convenience of the upload being built into Camtasia, the service becomes my winner and is a perfect solution for Screencasts.

Below is the same video uploaded to three services, Screencast.com, Vimeo, and YouTube. You tell me the quality difference. Keep in mind that my goal is to play the content back at full size, 900X480, or as close as the player will let me.

ScreenCast.com …

 

 

YouTube …

 

 

Vimeo …

#502 VS2010 Request : Bring back Show Shortcuts in Tooltips

In Visual Studio 2008, you could turn on the keyboard bindings to be displayed with the Tooltips. For example, if you hover over the save icon, you would also see CTRL+S. This was tip #64 for 2008, but seems to be missing from 2010. And I looked in every place I could, including the registry.

Now it’s possible that these can still be turned on somewhere, somehow, but I can’t find it. Maybe it was excluded because of performance? Maybe it can be programmed as a custom Tooltip Adorner? I don’t know, but maybe with this post, we’ll get an answer from the team.

Microsoft PDC Sessions/Keynotes online for Download

If you’re seen the tech new recently, you’ve heard about the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference). If you couldn’t make the conference (like me) then you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft has posted video of all the sessions and keynotes.

And they’re available for download. In fact, here is a set of CURL scripts that will download them for you all at once (or overnight depending on your bandwidth).

The script basically says – do I have this file? If no, go get it.

Included with the scripts, is a handy Renamer, that renames the file to the session name, which is much more meaningful than the original session number. But … what if (like my) you download 1/2 of them, and the other 1/2 die (or aren’t available)?

If you use the Renamer, the next time you try to fetch the videos, you’ll be fetching them all over again. So I hacked on the Renamer script a bit, to create an Un-Renamer 🙂 Basically the same script backwards. It just took a few minutes, but I thought it might be helpful to provide for others.

Enjoy: PDC09UnRenamer.zip

#501 :: Change the Background color of selected text

From now on, all tricks will be recorded using Visual Studio 2010, starting with the Beta2 Ultimate product. You’ll also notice that these are playing with YouTube now, since the announcement from Microsoft that Silverlight Live Hosting services will be going away.

Anyway — this is a simple tip to show changing the background color of the selected text in the Text Editor.