We have just released a new version of the Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) and we’ve given it a new name – the Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework (MMPPF). Yes, it’s a bit more difficult to say, and we don’t get to refer to it as the “SMurF” any more, but the new name represents how the framework is now a much more significant component of Microsoft’s media platform.

Over the last few weeks we’ve started to role out a new, umbrella brand for the various media technologies, tools, and frameworks that Microsoft offers. Aligning all of our media projects under the “Microsoft Media Platform” brand allows us to tell a much more comprehensive story about our end-to-end media pipeline. The Microsoft media platform currently comprises IIS media services, and smooth streaming on the server side (all components of Windows Server), Expression Encoder, the MMP video editor, the MMP Content Manager, the MMP Player Framework, and a number of other technologies. However, we’ll be incorporating more tools, frameworks, servers, and services in the future.

MMP Player Framework 2.5

This latest version of the Player Framework, built on Microsoft Silverlight, offers a number of new features and enhancements. One of the most important new features is our addition of stereoscopic 3D support. Now content providers can stream 3D video to consumers using the Player Framework and the Silverlight player. Here’s a video (WMV) demonstrating how to use this new feature.

In this new release we also put a significant amount of effort into developing an advertising plugin. This new plugin adds support for the VPAID, VAST, and MAST (PDF) standards. Check out this video (WMV) to learn how to use it.

Download MMPPF 2.5 here.

New in SMF 2.5

• Stereoscopic 3D support
• Standards based advertising support
• Fixed several bugs
• Uses SSME 1.5 Update 1
• See the downloads pagefor a full, detailed listing of changes in v2.5

If you’re considering writing an application for the new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series devices you now have a great, free training resource available to you courtesy of Microsoft’s Channel 9 site and fellow Evangelist Clint Rutkus.

We have just launched an all new series that teaches beginning developers with little programming experience how to develop applications for Windows Phone 7.  This series assumes that they have absolutely no knowledge of C#, Silverlight, or mobile development.  In just a few hours, they will understand the needed concepts to build applications.

Head on over to Channel 9 to start training now! Also, make sure you have the free Windows Phone 7 developer tools installed (and watch this video for instructions on how to install said tools).

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie will be hosting an event on December 2 in Redmond, WA where he will talk about the future of Silverlight. You won’t want to miss this. You can register to attend in person or online.

Agenda

Keynote : The Future of Silverlight

Be first to hear the official news about what’s coming up next for Silverlight from Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Corporate Vice President.

Data Binding In Silverlight and Windows Phone

Jesse Liberty walks us through the fundamentals of data binding, including binding to traditional and non-traditional data sources, binding to elements, binding in both Visual Studio and Blend, binding in code, data conversion and much more.

Building Compelling Apps with WCF using REST and LINQ

In this session we will cover how to build a WCF-based backend web service to provide data to the Silverlight application. We will demonstrate the use of LINQ in the service to retrieve objects from our database, and cover some details of how those objects are serialized to Silverlight. We will cover the use of faults for debugging and for driving production logic, as well as authentication strategies for internet and intranet deployment. We will finish with a look at how to access third-party REST/HTTP-based services from Silverlight.

Building Feature Rich Business Apps Today with RIA Services

Silverlight provides many different options for accessing distributed data including Web Services, REST APIs, sockets and more. This talk will walk you through the benefits that WCF RIA Services offers and demonstrate how it can be used to simplify n-tier programming and provide a flexible and productive way to access, validate and modify data in Silverlight applications. Topics covered include creating a domain service, simplifying asynchronous programming with the domain context, leveraging object tracking features, sharing data validation code between the client and server and writing domain services that can be used with any backend data access technology.

MVVM: Why and How? Tips and Patterns using MVVM and Service Patterns

See how good patterns and practices apply to Silverlight applications on the desktop, in the browser or on the phone. Learn how to integrate MVVM, Service Providers, design time data (aka Blendability), into your Silverlight applications to promote code reuse and create a highly maintainable application.

Tips and Tricks for a Great Installation Experience

Tired of seeing the spinning blue balls from Silverlight as the application loads? Your users probably are as well. The simple fact is that it is very easy to customize your complete application installation experience down to the plugin level. During this session you’ll see understand how Silverlight works with install/upgrade scenarios and how you can completely customize the installation experience. Additionally you’ll see custom ‘splash screen’ demonstrations on what you can do to further brand your application. If you are building an out-of-browser application with Silverlight we’ll discuss and demonstrate some of the tips/tricks to provide a good acquisition experience there as well and some tricks on automatically installing applications.

Tune Your Application: Profiling and Performance Tips

There are some common pitfalls that can negatively impact your Silverlight application’s performance. In this session we’ll demonstrate how to use some of the tools that are available to profile and identify performance issues. We’ll cover the available techniques with the performance tools that can help you to analyze your Silverlight application memory usage, rendering and CPU usage to help improve performance and avoid those common pitfalls.

Performance Tips for Silverlight Windows Phone 7

This will be a comprehensive deep-dive into Windows Phone performance. We will begin with the threading model changes and optimizations made to Silverlight run-time to take advantage of the GPU on the phone; we will then cover the most common pitfalls, the troubleshooting techniques, and close with the workarounds to create snappy Windows phone applications.

One of the great things about modern web technology conferences is that most of them put all of their session content online for free. Microsoft took it a step further for this year’s Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) and streamed all of the sessions live in HD using IIS Smooth Streaming and the Silverlight Media Framework (the PDC player application was developed by Vertigo who also works with us to develop the SMF).

All of the great PDC 2010 sessions are now available for your viewing pleasure.

Here’s a list of my favorite sessions:

• 3-Screen Coding: Sharing code between Windows Phone, Silverlight, and .NET
• Inside Internet Explorer 9 Performance
• Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with Internet Explorer 9
• Programming HTML 5
• Taking Advantage of Pinned Sites with Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7
• Kung Fu Silverlight: Top Tips and Architectural Patterns and Practices
• The Rich Mobile Web – Today and Tomorrow
• Best Practices for Building Cross-Browser Web Applications
• Introducing HTML5 Graphics : Canvas and SVG
• HTML5: More Than Just HTML5

The new SMFv2.2 also supports the IIS Smooth Streaming Client which gives you the ability to leverage smooth streaming functionality in your Windows Phone 7 application.

We squeezed a few other items into this release as well. Here’s a quick summary:

Fixes/Updates:

• Added support for Windows Phone 7, this includes a new set of binaries and a new Solution included in the source download
• Updated SMF and SMF for Windows Phone to v1.1 of the Smooth Streaming Media Element
• Fixed an issue in SMFPlayer that was preventing the databinding of SMFPlayer.CurrentPlaylistItem from working correctly.
• Added PlaylistItem.Duration
• Added a fix to TimedTextmarkerProvider for an issue that was causing captions to only display for the first Playlist Item.
• Fixed an issue with TimedTextMarkerProvider that was preventing captions from displaying when SMFPlayer.IsStartPositionOffset = true
• In the previous release the Smooth Streaming and Progressive player examples were missing their HTML and ReadMe files, these have been added back for this release.