Summary:
- Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Beta is being discontinued and will eventually be taken down
- A new Windows® Azure(TM)-based hosting and delivery service will be launched by the end of 2009, though this is not a direct replacement for Silverlight Streaming and will have costs associated with its use
- You can access, retrieve and if desired remove your content that is currently hosted on Silverlight Streaming by following the instructions below
- Key dates and information about the availability of the new Windows Azure functionality, and when the existing Silverlight Streaming beta service will be taken down, will be communicated in the coming weeks
Background:
Since May 2007, we have been offering a free beta service to host Silverlight applications and videos. This service is being discontinued to make way for a new Windows Azure-based service. Once this new service is launched, the current Silverlight Streaming beta service will eventually be taken down.
Don't panic! All your current content is safe and you will receive sufficient notice for you to make an informed decision on where to host your Silverlight content and applications. However, in the interim, we would like you to be aware of the following:
- Effective immediately, no new sign-ups are permitted for the Silverlight Streaming service. In addition, the Silverlight Streaming publishing plug-in for Expression Encoder will no longer be available for download.
- The new Windows Azure functionality will not be a direct replacement for the Silverlight Streaming service and will be a paid subscription service.
Steps you can take today:
- You can access all of your content that is currently hosted on Silverlight Streaming and also view the file system to retrieve your content locally. For complete instructions on how to do this, please refer to the Step by step instructions for retrieving Silverlight Streaming content section below.
- Stay tuned for more information. Key dates about the new Windows Azure-based functionality, and when the existing service will be taken down will be communicated in the coming weeks.
- You can learn more about the Windows Azure Platform here.
If you have additional questions, please contact us at slsfbk@microsoft.com.
Step by step instructions for retrieving Silverlight Streaming content:
You can directly access the file system of the Silverlight Streaming hosting service. This will be the easiest way to retrieve content directly to your computer. In order to do this, you need to know the Silverlight Streaming Account ID and Account Key used to access the file system. To get this information, do the following:
- Open a web browser and connect to http://silverlight.live.com
- Login with your Live ID.
- Click on Manage Account.
- You will see your Account ID and Key under the Account Information section at the bottom of the page.
You can connect to the SLS file system in a number of ways:
1. Map a network drive
Map to the following network drive, replacing <Account ID> with the numeric Account ID you found by following the steps above.
https://silverlight.services.live.com/<AccountID>/
2. Open as a web folder
- Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 200 and Windows Server 2003 users must install the latest Software Update for Web Folders.
- Internet Explorer users: open the web folder by connecting to the following URL, replacing <Account ID> with the numeric Account ID you found by following the steps above:
https://silverlight.services.live.com/<AccountID>/
- Other web browsers: copy and paste the following path into the "Run." box on the Start menu:
\\silverlight.services.live.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot\<AccountID>\
- When prompted for credentials, supply your Silverlight Streaming account information that you found by following the steps in the previous section.
Note for Vista users:
For improved performance, disable thumbnails as follows:
- Click on the Start button, then choose All Programs followed by Accessories
- Run Windows Explorer
- In Windows Explorer, click on the Organize button on the menu bar
- In the pull-down menu, click on Folder and Search Options
- In the Folder Options dialog window, click on the View tab
- Under the Files and Folders tree heading, ensure that Always show icons, never thumbnails is checked
3. Mac OS X users
In the Finder, choose Go ->Connect To Server. In the Server Address field, paste the following address, replacing <Account ID> with the numeric Account ID you found by following the steps above.
https://silverlight.services.live.com/<AccountID>/
As some of you have noticed, and taken the time to report either by email or in the forum, the Silverlight Streaming service experienced an unplanned outage yesterday afternoon. As of this morning everything should be up and running again.
A bit more information about this issue:
Direct access to videos and video upload functionality was impacted, videos were still accessible via iframe invocation. For that reason applications were mostly not impacted by the problem, as most of them would be instantiated using the iframe invocation method.
The administration web site itself was not affected.
The data store was not affected.
The Silverlight Streaming service is now back online, and you should be able to render your videos and Silverlight applications from the service as before the outage.
However in order to restore availability we had to take some action that will possibly negatively impact the video playback rendering performance in some geographical regions, in particular Western Europe. The other regions should not see a significant deprecation in performance.
We are continuing to work on narrowing down the issue behind the instability of the last few days. Once again, allow me to thank you again for your patience and whoever took the time to report the issue.
As you may have noticed, the service is acting up again this morning. As a user so gently put it "It looks like the 'root cause' of the outage managed to grow new roots." I love this touch of humor in this very frustrating situation. We're working on it. Stay tuned.
Root cause has been identified and the fix applied. Allow me to thank everybody who took the time to report the problem, again, and renew my apologies on behalf of the team for the inconvenience it caused all of you.
We are investigating the root cause of the issues impacting the service again today. The impact is the same as two days ago. Sorry for the inconvenience. Stay tuned.
Two separate issues were identified and and addressed on the live site on Monday afternoon and Tuesday noon respectively. The Silverlight Streaming service should be back to full functionality as of Tuesday 1/27 12:30 PM PST. Thanks to everybody who took the time to report the problem. Renewed apologies for the inconvenience it caused all of you.
Even though the admin web site is up and running, there were several reports of videos or applications not being served out of the Silverlight Streaming service during the week-end. They have been escalated and are being investigated.
The impact is that such features as the video preview page or the application test page are not rendering properly, and that the third party applications relying on the service are not fully functional.
There is no immediate ETA for resolution. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience on the matter, as well as your continued support of the service while it is in Beta.
The Silverlight Streaming publishing plug-in for Expression Encoder has been updated to support the new Silverlight 2 templates that were added in Expression Encoder 2 SP1. It is available from the Microsoft Download Center here.
Interesting blog cross-references:
Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live has been upgraded to work with Silverlight 2 applications using the RTW bits. Remember, it will no longer work with Silverlight 2 apps using the Beta 2 bits, so please make sure to update such apps, if you have any, as quickly as possible not to impact your customers.
The upgrade will not affect your Silverlight 1 apps hosted in SLS.
Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live will be in maintenance mode this morning (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM PST) as we perform the upgrade to make it work with Silverlight 2 RTW bits. While we have no planned outage during this maintenance period, you may experience some intermittent timeouts as we cycle the servers out and back in rotation (half of them first, then the other half).
We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you again for you continued support and usage of this service.
The outcome of the upgrade is that Silverlight Streaming will work with Silverlight 2 apps using the RTW bits. It will no longer work with Silverlight 2 apps using the Beta 2 bits, so please make sure to update such apps, if you have any hosted in SLS.
The upgrade will not affect your Silverlight 1 apps hosted in SLS.
As we finally have time to perform the upgrade work to make the Silverlight Streaming service work with the Silverlight 2 RTW bits, it is important to note that your applications hosted in Silverlight Streaming will also have to be updated to use the Silverlight 2 RTW bits.
There is good information on ScottGu's Blog describing how to upgrade your applications from Silverlight 2 Beta 2 to Silverlight 2 RTW smoothly, so they do not break when Silverlight Streaming is updated. Note that this should not impact your Silverlight 1 applications hosted in Silverlight Streaming.
This service maintenance work is scheduled in the next few days, I will be posting updates on this blog to keep you informed.
As you have undoubtedly noticed, the Silverlight Streaming service has not yet been upgraded to work with Silverlight 2 RTW. This will be done shortly. Until this work is completed, here is a short FAQ about the side effects:
- Silverlight Streaming will work with Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2 Beta 2 only
- The Silverlight Streaming upload stack relies on a Silverlight control, so the Browse button will be disabled if you have Silverlight 2 RTW onlyour machine
- This will be true for both the Manage Applications and Manage Videos scenarios
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay, and are working to perform the upgrade as soon as possible.
The Silverlight Streaming ads pilot program has launched and is live in production!
A couple of weeks ago, we successfully launched the SLS ads trial (see previous references below). This means that for the very first time, we have opened up a Windows Live service to breadth developers to enable them to use the Microsoft adCenter Publisher platform. There is real US Dollar revenue associated to this pilot program. It is currently available in the US only, to people who can fill in a W9 form.
This pilot program allows you to upload video content to Silverlight Streaming and play it back with contextual ads relevant to the playback experience, based on keywords you provide at video upload time, or configure later on in the video properties. The selected participants will become adCenter Publisher account holders seamlessly, as the account provisioning into the ads platform is done directly when they decide to enable ads in their SLS-based video playback experience. This will allow them to login directly directly to https://beta.pubcenter.microsoft.com.
We are still accepting participants, so if you think this is for you, register on the web interest form, we'll process the pool of participants for the second batch of invites to the ads trial program shortly.
Previous references to the SLS ads trial program on this blog: March 26 blog post | April 29 blog post
The Silverlight Streaming service has been successfully upgraded to work with Silverlight 2 Beta 2. As mentioned in my previous post about this maintenance release, all Silverlight 2 Beta 1 applications hosted in SLS should be upgraded to use the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime as soon as possible if it is not already done. They are no longer supported from SLS, and they will no longer work anyway as soon as the Beta 1 time bomb kicks in. The Silverlight 1 applications are not impacted by this service upgrade.
In conjunction with this SLS upgrade, all existing and new albums created on PhotoZoom are now displayed with the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 version of Deep Zoom. More information about this topic in the PhotoZoom section of Matt's blog.