A Silverlight HVP Update

I’m extremely pleased to report that a start-up e-learning company (currently code-named WL) has committed approximately 100 hours / week of development time by four of their world-class Silverlight developers,  from now through February. All of the work they do will be fully integrated into the Silverlight HVP and released under the Ms-PL.

We are currently working on the feature list for Version 1, but the very good news is that virtually all of the features they are most interested in,  are either on the feature list already (either for V1 or beyond) or are completely consistent with the idea and spirit of the Silverlight HyperVideo Player. 

Among the features under consideration for V1 (March, 2010) are:

Architecture

• Implementing a fully modular architecture
• MEF from Day 1
• Creating a Viewer that will hold Frames, where Frames are named sets of controls.

• One example of a Frame will be a player derived from the SMF
• Another example of a Frame will be an HTML viewer for displaying web links
• A third example of a Frame will probably display animations

Features

• Out of Browser capabilities
• Identification, Authentication and Authorization
• Local Storage
• Skinning with Templates
• Authoring Tools

Interactivity & Collaboration

• Multicasting
• Interactive Response
• Real-time communication

Standards And Protocols

• Extension of the protocols for encapsulating the linkage between a marker in a video and the actions to take (e.g., pausing the video and displaying additional information) to conform to emerging or existing industry standards.
• Integration with existing or creation of new Experience (EMS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS) and other analytics
• SCORM compatibility
• Potential integration with Microsoft Semblio and related projects

Details about WL will be available early in 2010, but we are already beginning the work of creating the specifications, and coding will start will start next week (“you start coding, I’ll go find out what they want…”)

Core Technologies

The Silverlight HVP is now committed to the following technologies and practices:

• The Silverlight Media Framework
• The  Managed Extensibility Framework
• WCF RIA Services 
• Lean Development  as discussed, e.g.,   by Shalloway, Beaver and Trott
• KanBan for project management as described, for example,  by David J. Anderson
• Test Driven Development with well factored, maintainable and trustworthy unit tests as described, eg., by Osherove,  James Newkirk and others.

Help Wanted!

• Contributing Developers
• QA
• Project Management (assist with oversight of the project)
• Software Architect to assist with creating units of work and “just-enough specification”

Please see Contributing To The Project in the HVP CodePlex documentation.

Unconfirmed and Fully Deniable Rumors

We are discussing obtaining extensive User Interface support with a world-class web design organization that has done some incredibly creative and closely related work. More on this as soon as possible.