MSDN Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 86) Laurence Moroney Silverlight Create A Custom Expression Encoder Publishing Plug-In recently released tool, Microsoft® Expression® Encoder helps you encode, enhance, and publish rich media experiences that can be rendered using Microsoft Silverlight™. Expression Encoder has an extensible plug-in architecture, giving you the ability to write plug-ins that allow for the publication of Expression Encoder output to different sources. In this article, I will step through the building of a plug-in for Expression Encoder using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 Beta 2. This plug-in will fit within the standard workflow of an Expression Encoder session, and, at the end of an encoding session, it will upload the resulting output to an FTP server. Publish To list is populated from the names of the valid plug-ins detected in the plug-ins directory. The Auto Start Publish checkbox is always available and, if checked, will kick off the publication automatically at the end of an encoding. The Publish button is grayed out until encoding is complete, at which point it becomes available. By clicking the button, you can then publish all the files associated with the encoding at once. (This could be a single file if no template is used, or all files needed for the video player if a template is used.) The Settings section This article is based on a prerelease version of Visual Studio 2008. All information herein is subject to change. Expression Encoder and Plug-Ins contains the video preview and a control bar that allows you to set the portion of the video to re-encode. On the right-hand side of the screen, there are three tabs: Settings, for configuring up the encoding session; Metadata, for applying new information to the media; and Output, for taking post-encode actions. When a publishing plug-in is present in \ Plugins and is loaded correctly, the Output tab will contain a Publish pane that lists the available publishing options. Each type requires a separate plug-in. Figure 2 shows that the FTP plug-in is available. The top part of the Publish pane is fixed for all plug-ins. The 86 msdnmagazine Figure 1 shows Expression Encoder. The left side of the workspace This article uses the following technologies: WPF, Visual Studio, Expression Encoder This article discusses: Expression Encoder plug-in basics Building a boilerplate plug-in ✥ Adding FTP upload functionality ✥ Building, installing, and debugging ✥ ✥ Laurence Moroney is a Senior Technology Evangelist with Microsoft, specializing in Silverlight. He is the author of many books on computing topics, including Silverlight, AJAX, interoperability, and security. His blog is at blogs.msdn.com/webnext. http://blogs.msdn.com/webnext
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.