Michael Wolf

Wednesday November 18, 2009

Silverlight 4 beta and web cam support

I'm here at PDC 09, where I'm very excited about all the possibilities in Silverlight 4. When we jumped into 1.1/1.0/WPFE several years ago, we never thought silverlight would evolve so quickly, but here we are. One of the most exciting features, which allot of users have been asking for since the bad old Silverlight 1.1 days is webcam and mic support like they had known in flex. Now with Silverlight 4 you will have direct access to both mic and webcam. This opens up allot of possibilities for creative and collaborative work, everywhere from Ribbit on silverlight for voip phone calls in the browser, to using silverlight to do fun things like Elf yourself.

The video below shows the webcam support in action (as well as drag and drop to be covered tomorrow). This is a silverlight 4 application utilizing the new VideoCaptureDevice to create a simple stop action animation application.



The code is very simple. The first thing you need to do is request use of the web cam. The webcam use must be user requested, and can be automatic, say on a loaded event.



After which if you would like to take a capture, you need to fire the async capture event.



Later tonight we will be posting the live application , so watch for updates via facebook and twitter. Over the coming weeks I will be posting about other new silverlight 4 features starting tomorrow with the new drag and drop from desktop features. Plus look out for videos Rick and Myself did with Pete Brown at PDC 09.