Visual Studio 2008, the latest version of Microsoft’s popular integrated development environment (IDE), launched on Monday as reported by Somasegar. You can download the free C# Express Edition here. In a post today at the Windows Media Center Sandbox blog, Charlie provides some useful information for Media Center developers:

We put the template support in for Visual Studio 2008 towards the very end of the 5.3 development cycle as a ‘bonus’ to fulfill community requests — you’ll notice we don’t even mention it in the What’s New section of the SDK documentation at all since we didn’t know the street date for Visual Studio 2008.

He notes that if you only have one of the Visual Studio 2008 SKUs installed, then a template will be missing after installing the Windows Media Center SDK 5.3. To solve the issue, make sure you have a Visual Studio 2005 SKU installed alongside 2008 (they can happily live side-by-side). If you install VS2005 after VS2008, you’ll need to a repair on the Media Center SDK.

And as a best practice, install the Media Center SDK after you have installed the IDEs.

For more information on version 5.3 of the Windows Media Center SDK, see this post.

Who decided that you can only eat bacon and eggs for breakfast? Seems like a useless “rule” to me, and thankfully restaurants like Denny’s allow me to order breakfast food 24/7. Similarly, who decided your Media Center has to be in the living room? That “rule” is also useless, and thankfully there’s MCEDev to make the devices useful in other rooms, like the kitchen (via TV Squad):

The idea is simply – why not use the powerful Media Center platform in the kitchen? Watch news, your favourite episodes or let the Media Center play some music while you’re cooking.

What would be the most interesting application for a kitchen? Correct - a cookbook.

Sounds like a pretty cool application - an interactive cookbook that helps you with recipes, everything from preparation to a step-by-step walkthrough.

Even more amazing are the mirror displays that adnotam makes (they approached MCEDev about the app). They make the kitchen look like a normal kitchen when the Media Center is turned off.

Awesome! What other rooms would be good for Media Center customizations? Maybe the garage?

Microsoft’s Program Manager for HD Photo (aka Windows Media Photo) Bill Crow was on hand yesterday at the Pro Photo Summit in Redmond to show off the photo technology that Microsoft has been working on. In his presentation he used the recently announced Windows Live Photo Gallery to compare HD Photo and JPEG. Don’t worry if you weren’t there, because Bill has a post up today comparing High Dynamic Range Editing with the two formats that I suspect captures the essence of his presentation:

Higher fidelity images can be stored in a high dynamic range, wide gamut format using either fixed or floating point numerical encoding. HD Photo retains image content that would otherwise fall outside the visible range and be clipped using the more typical unsigned integer numerical representation (TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and most other formats.) This may happen when the camera converts from RAW, or during any other editing or conversion operation.

His post contains a bunch of screenshots of Windows Live Photo Gallery as well as links to the two sample photos he used, so check it out!

Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 users can download a free plug-in to add HD Photo support on Windows Vista and Windows XP. Bill says in his post that a version for OS X (both PPC and Intel) is coming soon.

I think Microsoft’s television strategy is pretty clear: throw as many ideas and products out there as you can and see what sticks. With MSN TV, Mediaroom, Windows Media Centre, and a number of other products, you’d think Microsoft would be content to improve what they already have. But no, today they announced LiveStation, a P2P live television broadcasting application built using Silverlight.

The project is a joint venture between Microsoft Research and UK-based Skinkers. Don Dodge has more on the technology behind LiveStation:

LiveStation is built on two research technologies, Pastry and SplitStream, from Microsoft’s Cambridge Research Lab. Pastry is a type of P2P system called a ‘distributed hash table,’ which makes it easier for computers to find and store information, and to organize themselves for collaborative tasks. Splitstream is an application built on top of Pastry which allows real-time streams such as live video to be robustly distributed peer-to-peer.

TechCrunch wrote about LiveStation today too:

And while it is certainly an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of Silverlight, its not even close to being productized and launched. For now, consider it little more than a pretty video.

True enough. You can watch that video here. LiveStation is currently in closed beta. I entered my email at the beta site, so hopefully I’ll get an invite soon.

For more on this story, check out TechMeme.

UPDATE: Long Zheng makes the very good point that
LiveStation isn’t really a Microsoft product.

I went to launch Windows Media Encoder earlier today, and accidently clicked on “Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition” instead. Instead of the application opening, I was presented with this error message:

Didn’t see that coming! I am a digital pack rat, so I still have the setup file - I downloaded it on October 3rd, 2006. I remember installing Studio Edition and having a quick look around, but I promptly forgot all about it.

Until today, that is.

So off to the Windows Media Encoder downloads page I go. Turns out the Studio Edition beta is history:

Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition Beta 1 is no longer available. Please visit the Windows Media Software Products Vendor page to learn about third-party products that provide advanced Windows Media Video encoding.

A quick search revealed no further information. I have no idea when the download disappeared.

Does anyone know what happened to Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition? My guess is that it was discontinued in favor of the Expression Media Encoder, but I am not sure. At least the latter product has a shorter name!

Leave me a comment if you have any details, thanks!

Microsoft released a Windows Media Services (WMS) package for Windows Server 2008 June CTP this week. Bill Staples, who runs the Web Server engineering teams at Microsoft, says the package is now supported on the Web SKU, though the download page says some features (such as the WMS Cache/Proxy plug-in) are not supported.

From the download page:

Use this release of Windows Media Services to test a Windows Media server running the Windows Server 2008 (June CTP) operating system in a test environment. Microsoft Windows Media Services is an industrial-strength platform for streaming live or on-demand audio and video content over the Internet or an intranet.

Here is the WMS package download, and more information on the June CTP.

Very late last night Microsoft announced the managed beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG). It’s an example of the renewed Software+Services focus of Windows Live. According to Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Experience Blog, WLPG “includes all of the features of Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista” while also adding some new functionality and integrating with Windows Live services.

If it really does include all of the features of the previous app, then that means it should support the HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo) format. If that’s true, then WLPG might be the first widespread bit of software to include support for the fledgling photo format. Version 3 of the .NET Framework includes support for HD Photo, but it will take applications for support to really take off. As WLPG will run on both Windows Vista and Windows XP, it could go a long way to promoting HD Photo as a format.

Too bad the beta is closed - I’d love to try it out! In the meantime, check out the screenshots and other information Brandon posted.

If you were looking forward to the next version of Windows Media Center, I have bad news for you - it looks like the project has been delayed. The update, which is believed to go by the Fiji codename, looks to be stalled according to Chris Lanier:

The beta program, which many of you may have registered for isn’t exactly moving along. The invites that were supposed to be sent out on May 31th have gone no where fast. This leads me to think that the target ship date for Fiji is no where close. 

Chris suggests that Fiji may not see the light of day until late 2008. Ars Technica picked up the story too, and mentioned that DirecTV support, HD-DVD playback, and improved support for CableCARD are all rumored features of the update.

Of course, one should keep in mind that Microsoft has not officially described Fiji as a Media Center-specific update. There seems to be something of a lockdown at Microsoft when it comes to future versions of Windows, so it could very well turn out that Fiji is actually Vista SP1 or something like that.

Either way, it looks like Windows Media Center fans will have to wait a while for new stuff on the software side of things.