Carl Franklin

.NET Wonk

December 2003 - Posts

Update on .NET Rocks! Live

One of the cool things about producing DNR offline is that I can take the ambient noise out of my microphone track, and the hum, crackle, and whine out of the telephone track. Well, that poses a challenge for doing live shows, so I set off to find a way to remove this noise in real time.

After scouring the net for hours on several occasions, I always came back to the CEDAR hardware devices for cleaning up audio in real time. If it wasn't for the fact that they cost about 10 grand, I would have persued it further.

I ended up using Sound Laundry 2.5 from Algorithmix, a stand-alone audio cleaner utility that has a “Live” mode - 99 bucks. I had to wire up another Layla 24/96 audio interface to my rack (if anyone is interested in my studio setup, let me know and I'll give the tour) and after drawing out a complex routing pattern using a little mackie mixer, I got it all working, and working great!

Basically, I take the inputs from the mic and telephone recording device and run them through sound laundy. Then I take the outputs of that, and route it back into the mixer, where I can pan and EQ, then send the mains back into two other inputs of the Layla.

I then use the Windows Media Encoder to push the audio signal from that clean stereo input up to the Windows Media Server.  I love this shit!

So, after I get all the bugs worked out, and come up with a production process, I'll do a live morning show for about a week just to test the waters. We'll see if there are any bottlenecks, what the production issues are, etc., and whether or not people will want to listen to it!

Keep the comments coming. I'm listening to any and all feedback, even Jim Cheseborough!

Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services Rocks!

I was connected with XP Pro to a Windows 2003 Server via termserv, and I changed the IP address of my client without thinking or caring that I'd be knocked off the server. Yeah, except that it didn't happen. Somehow the server got word of my new address and went on happy as a clam. I swear that's a really hard thing to pull off. Awesome job, MS!

Temporary .NET Rocks! audio stream up and running

mms://radio1.franklins.net/dnr

Not ready for widespread public consumption yet, I just wanted to get some feedback from my blog readers! :-)

I've interspersed dnr shows with cuts from my CD, Strange Communication. It's on an infinite loop, but should last at least 11 or 12 hours.

.NET Rocks! now available on CD
Well, I realize you read my blog for technical content, but I have to announce that .NET Rocks! is now available on CD. In fact, you can buy any and all past shows on CD for 9.99 each. We will put some discounts together for large orders in the future. Enjoy.
24-Hour .NET Rocks! Feed <- In Progress

I'm working on a 24-hour .NET Rocks! audio stream using Windows Media Services where you can tune in to current and archived shows, original music, and commentary. It should be live in early to mid-January if all goes well.

Do you have suggestions? Comments? Advice? I'd like to hear it all.

Carl

New Class Schedule at franklins.net

VB.NET Master Class with Carl Franklin

Dates: Jan 19-23 (Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Feb 16-20 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Mar 8-12 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Apr 5-9 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
May 3-7 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Jun 7-11 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Cost: $2000

ASP.NET Master Class with Carl Franklin

Dates: Jan 12-16 (Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Feb 9-13 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Mar 15-19 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
May 10-14 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Cost: $2000

Advanced Sockets in VB .NET!

Dates: Mar 2 (Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
May 18 (
Franklins.Net - New London, CT)
Cost: $799

We got Bandwidth baby!

.NET Rocks! is now running on a 10 Megabit pipe at franklins.net!  Thanks to Microsoft and our show sponsors for helping out with that!

You may have noticed that you're no longer waiting for downloads. :-)

By the way, I love my ISP: Interbridge Networks (www.interbridge.net)

Enjoy

 

Transcript of .NET Rocks! with Alan Cooper

We never really publicized this, but Dennis made a transcript of the January 2003 show we did with Alan Cooper. This continues to be our most popular show, and gives you a concise overview of some of Alan's major philosophies and ideas, as well as some great stories including showing the VB designer (Ruby) to Bill Gates for the first time. Alan invented the Visual Basic designer and the VBX, which became the core of the VB product line, and survived all the way to Visual Studio.NET (for all languages). This is classic stuff

Transcript: http://www.franklins.net/dnr_alan_cooper.pdf

Listen: http://www.franklins.net/fnetdotnetrocks/dotnetrocks.aspx?showid=16

 

New .NET Rocks! Website

.NET Rocks! is finally a data-driven ASP.NET site!

http://www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks/

Thanks to franklins.net superstar Dennis Perlot for writing the code!

Code for Compressing Objects to disk and memory

I have often used the awesome freeware ICSharpLib managed compression library but I found myself doing the same thing with it all the time, which is to compress datasets, collections, and arrays to and from byte arrays and streams. So, I wrote some generic code to do this using the ICSharpLib compression dll.

Here's the interface:

Function CompressObjectToStream(ByVal OpenStream As System.IO.Stream, ByVal AnyObject As Runtime.Serialization.ISerializable) As System.IO.Stream

Function DeCompressStreamToObject(ByVal OpenStream As System.IO.Stream) As Object

Function CompressObject(ByVal AnyObject As Runtime.Serialization.ISerializable) As Byte()

Function DeCompressObject(ByVal Data() As Byte) As Object

You can download it from http://www.franklins.net/dotnet/CarlsZipLibrary.zip (about 1.3MB)

It comes with the original ICSharpZip library, and a demo that uses it to compress a filled dataset to disk .

Enjoy,

Carl

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