So, I stopped even paying attention to Scoble probably years ago. Simply too much info.
Only it looks like he spilled the beans a while back. Beans I was waiting to see MS spill.
Those beans. Top secret beans that I've been sitting on for over 6 months now... awaiting the day that 'Subservient' would see the light of day. Then scoble blogs about it... and I miss it.
At any rate, I wrote the code for those 'beans'. Both the Web and ClickOnce versions. It was actually quite a hoot to do - and I love the way they've documented everything.
Go give it a whirl. (It only works in IE of course (and no, not of course because it comes from MS, but because it makes heavy, programatic use of WMP and there just wasn't any way that I could see to do the same thing in FF...)) The web version uses a verrrry early version of ATLAST, and does some brute-ish manipulation of two WMP instances within the page to handle the transition between the programmer doing the stuff you tell him to do and spending time in a loop 'typing'. My favorite part? The 'dampening' type goodness that happens once the requested video has been loaded.
You can try the ClickOnce option (it will install .NET 2.0 on you if you don't have it on your box). Once installed, the ClickOnce version is actually a media-rich SmartClient Application - meaning that it will do as much as it can online, but if it doesn't have a network connection, it will just make due with what it has locally. So, each time you're online it will pull down videos (it actually streams them down to a cache, then plays them from the cache), and store them for future use. When you go offline, it only plays from the video 'arsenal' that it finds locally.
Cool stuff. Too bad I missed the parade...
Oh, and another thing: the purpose of building this was to showcase what kind of applications you could build with the FREE versions of Visual Studio 2005 (i.e., the free Express Editions). All of the code was done with Visual C# Express, (Ported to Visual Basic Express), and with Visual Web Developer Express. All 100% free...
(Oh, and my favorite? tell him to rap...)
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