Rich internet applications, part 2: Silverlight™ media player

Embedded video players, like the popular Adobe Flash™ and Microsoft Silverlight™ media player, represent the cornerstone components of modern rich internet applications (RIA), extending the web page interactivity, responsiveness, aesthetic appeal and overall user experience. Embedded players could serve as efficient educational tools: virtual classrooms, interactive tutorials, providing instructional materials in rather inspirational and intuitive manner. Adobe Flash™ (implemented, for example, in YouTube™) has tremendous installation base worldwide and currently pretty much dominates this sector of technology. At the same time, relatively new but rather promising technologies are actively penetrating the market of rich internet applications, most notably: HTML 5.0 and Microsoft Silverlight™.

The latest release of Silverlight™ (version 4.0) provides extremely powerful rich internet applications development platform, helping to bridge the gap between web applications and their desktop counterpart in terms of user experience and dynamic content streaming. As an example, the latest highly sophisticated web-based HD video player, developed by Netflix™, is built on the Silverlight™ technology set and is compatible with all major web browsers, including the most popular Internet Explorer and Firefox (note: browser compatibility and compliance with w3C standards provides tremendous advantage of web applications over their “installable” desktop/laptop counterparts: the latter are heavily platform/OS dependent and typically are much more labor intensive in regards to installation/upgrade/maintenance. To the contrary, web applications are essentially platform independent, adhered to the concept of “thin client”, which in simple words means “zero installable and maintenance free”).

Silverlight™ is essentially a client-side technology, backed by a full power of Microsoft ASP.NET framework. Certain knowledge of basic .NET programming is required in order to master the Silverlight™ coding technique, design pattern and practices.

The good starting point could be a sample implementation of the embedded Silverlight™ media player, thoroughly described in the article by Dr. Alexander Bell on CodePlex. Custom application program interface (API) is written in popular programming language C# (pronounced: see-sharp). It provides plenty of media player customization features, such as programmatically setting of initial values and auto-play options, adding chapters, dynamically changing the visual styles (so-called “skins”), etc. All necessary downloadable components, detailed tutorial and code snippets are available free of charge at link.

See the fully functional working demo.

Copyright© 2010 Alexander Bell

Resources

1. Microsoft Silverlight™ media player
2. Microsoft Silverlight™ media player (demo)
3. Rich internet applications: Silverlight™, YouTube™ (tutorial and downloads)
4. Embedded YouTube™ video player: tutorial and downloads
5. Embedded YouTube™ video player with custom playlist (demo)