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It's not a secret that one of my favorite Silverlight 4 features is the webcam support and I already played endless hours with it. There are many blog posts out there demonstrating how to use the webcam and how to take a screenshot with the CaptureImageAsync method. Only a few cover the VideoSink.

This introductory article will explain how to write pixel shaders for Silverlight and WPF, what tools should be used, and how to work with the tools. Furthermore, it will show how to build an extensible Silverlight shader application.

It takes about 27 minutes but is much easier than you would think.  There are a lot of little things that you need to do but it is fun and when you are done you will be ready to make your very own Silverlight video tutorials just like me and possibly get MSFT MVP along the way.

Comparing with the Adobe Flash Player, Microsoft has provided the first step to support the live voice/video chatting through the web By Supports dealing with the Microphone and the Camera in Silverlight 4, Yes it was a great step but still not enough, there is more of a problem is still unresolved, and as a programmer you have to rely on yourself to make your own programming solutions if you decided to go forward to work on Silverlight techniques to create your own live voice/video chatting software [...]

During my visit to Finland last month, I got the opportunity to demonstrate some of the new features in Silverlight 4 in demo-form. Today, I’ll review the webcam demo.

The first thing I did was grab Tim Heuer’s webcam sample which already handles activating the webcam. Tim did a great job with this, so instead of reinventing the wheel for this demo I decided to start with his code and add my requirements. First I wanted to hit the UI, so I created a new project, and copied the UI from Tim then took out what I did not need and add what I did need. Of course I did all of this in Expression Blend. Cider is great, but I’m faster in Blend by far. The UI is very simple, so this was a minimal effort.

I thought I’d modify the code from the last post a little in order to try and capture audio along with the video. This opened up some “interesting questions” in that in Silverlight you derive from an AudioSink to capture audio and from a VideoSink to capture video.

Now, those 2 base classes look awfully similar and if you want to capture both audio and video and try to synchronise the two then it feels a bit painful that you can’t implement some capturing interfaces rather than have to derive from base classes.

In this video you can see how Pete Brown and Tim Heuer interview Mike Wolf from Cynergy Systems at PDC09.

Mike has built a Silverlight 4 demo application that uses the new webcam feature, and a png sequencer of his own design, to create stop-motion animation.