James Clarke turned me on to the fact that modifying the Expression Encoder templates is trivial.  I tweaked the AudioGrey template to turn off autoplay and changed the default volume.  Of course, one could even take this further and really modify the templates, which Tim Heuer has a great post on.  So, this makes for a streamlined workflow for getting audio (or video) onto your blog.  The pieces of the puzzle:

Expression Encoder

Silverlight Streaming Publishing Plug-in

Silverlight Streaming Account

Windows Live Writer

Silverlight Streaming Live Writer Plug-in

The net result: here's the audio player playing my composition hill.climb embedded in this blog post:

So, I've been playing with Ableton Live recently as my digital audio workstation.  It is great software -- fantastic UI and awesome features as far as integration audio and midi. There's much power in this tool. 

I recently composed a piece called "Hill Climb" and wanted to make it available to the world via Silverlight.  I used the audio template from Expression Encoder and have the whole deal hosted on Silverlight Streaming.  I would have used the Silverlight Streaming Publishing Plug-in, but the problem I discovered is that the templates generated by Expression Encoder always auto-play the media upon page load. There's no way to toggle that from the UI, which means I had to go tweak the auto-play parameter in the generated StartPlayer.js file.  So, I couldn't use the plug-in, but rather zipped up the files and posted them to Silverlight streaming myself, adding the player to my blog on the right column.

If you'd like to see the workflow including the plug-in, check out this post, which has a good tutorial. 

The folks at Yahoo! have updated their beta to now support 64 bit as well, so if you wanted to try the application but got shut down because you were on a 64 bit machine, you can go grab the latest download and install it.

In The New Iteration, SNOOP is discussed, a great tool for visualizing and manipulating the WPF visual tree on the fly.  I also wanted to highlight some of the great community efforts that build upon this idea. Josh Smith, Andrew Smith and Karl Shifflett have released a Visual Studio Visualizer for WPF that is similar to Snoop but provides more features.

This product allows unlimited drilling into the visual and logical trees and any sub-objects of these, including objects in the managed heap. User can also view the run-time visual and XAML of the object.

The following two articles get into visualzers and explain the two versions of Mole.

Current Version:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/moleIIforWPF.aspx

Original Version:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/MoleForWPF.aspx

Mole's Home Page:

http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/mole-visual-studio-visualizer-for-wpf/

I'm excited to announce the availability of a white paper that's been long in the making: The New Iteration: How XAML Transforms the Collaboration Between Designers and Developers in WPF.  This is a 28 page white paper written by Jaime Rodriguez and I that digs into issues and solutions when working on a WPF project with both designers and developers.  A result of extensive interviews with developers and designers with real world WPF experience, Jaime and I tried to get some canonical information out there for people trying to live the XAML dream and realize the benefits of the new workflows engendered by XAML.  We talked to both internal Microsoft folks as well as many external companies to coalesce the best practices that are being established in this domain.

I'm proud of the entire paper.  Here's some highlights: The sections on XAML provide a perspective on XAML that I don't think has been articulated before in terms of how XAML makes the workflow possible.  The section on roles and workflow took us many iterations and ultimately puts into place some different models to implement when actually getting into the nitty gritty of collaborating on a project. I think this graphic in particular does a nice job of explaining the workflow visually (thanks to Tim Aidlin for doing the graphic):

The best practices for designers and developers I think have a lot of great tactical tips worth exploring.

I've started a thread on the paper over in the WPF forums and would love to see that be a place for an ongoing discussion of some of the ideas forwarded by Jaime and I.

Here's a pdf version of the paper if you are interested.