Between some exciting day job work, updating WCF content for the WCF Unleashed book, and writing 15 chapters for the CardSpace book (this time as a sole author) things have been pretty hectic.  Mix in the storm that flooded the first floor of the house, and it got even crazier.

The blog has been fairly dark for awhile, but that's about to change. In a few weeks, the CardSpace book will be handed in, and I can start focusing on other activities. In addition to weekly updates here, I'm also going to be starting a sister blog to this one, more details on that in the weeks to come.

So what's coming? Lots of stuff.

Like what?

I talked with the good folks at APress (my publisher for the CardSpace book), and I'm going to be able to release some of my code from the CardSpace book early, and put it into CodePlex.  This will include ASP.NET controls that integrate with membership. This will also include Windows Workflow Foundation activities and some utilities for creating managed cards.  These will hopefully be in CodePlex, which will include source, so you'll be able to get source and enhance them as you need to. I need to stress that these are from my book written as my 'night job', these are not official controls from Microsoft and should not be viewed as such.

I've actually been pretty busy on some other stuff during the day, and we're looking at what we can release of that (unrelated to CardSpace) to CodePlex as well.

Plus.. I've written about 6 labs in the past couple of days for an internal event.  I'm looking to release those as well, likely with the launch of the sister blog to this one.

Oh, and some InfoCenter Controls may just find there way into CodePlex as well (and if not, I'll release them as binaries from my blog). And I might just include a reference app that shows how to snag podcasts for your Zune

CUCUSOFT has released the Zune Video Converter Suite. I purchased this last week prior to heading out to Vegas for the WebBuilder 2.0 confernence.  As you might imagine, this is a much nicer experience in comparison to the pseudo-hack methods I posted earlier.   While I’ve not used it for DVD video yet, I did use it to convert some of my MediaCenter recordings (about 10 episodes of one of my favorite TV shows) and it did a great job.

The night before my trip, I queued up 10 episodes of one of my favorite TV shows  (that had been recorded with MediaCenter).  I’m happy to report the result were files that were resized to the size of the Zune and were a little over 200 megs each.  I watched 3 episodes on the Zune (each over an hour) on my way to Vegas, and can report quality was quite satisfactory.

On the DVD side, I’m very interestied in testing it out when I get back. I’ve used PocketDVD Wizard in the past (for smartphone and pocketpc), but the conversion time was an absolute nightmare (very long). CUCUSOFT claims to be faster than most packages, as it does the conversion in a single pass (vs. 2 pass conversions in other software packages).

I would imagine this functionality would come to the Zune at some point (wishful thinking, anyway), but if you’re looking for a quick fix, I’d personally recommend it.

NOTE:  I ran this on my MediaCenter PC at home which is not migrated over to Windows Vista yet – if you’re looking to run this on Vista, I’d double-check with the folks at CUCUSOFT to confirm that it’s compatible.

http://www.cucusoft.com/dvd-to-zune+zune-video-converter-Suite.asp

After alot of hassles (online retailer not delivering, local stores being totally sold out), I finally managed to get my hands on a new Zune device today.

If you've got a Zune as well, you may have noticed that there are some cool videos pre-loaded on the Zune, but there does not appear to be any Zune videos for sale in the marketplace yet (atleast I haven't seen them).

If you have MediaCenter installed or you have DVDs you'd like to watch on the Zune, this entry's for you.

Media Center MS-DVR files on Zune

Ok, there's presently no out-of-the-box syncing of MS-DVR files to Zune.  The good news is that there's a tool, DVRMSToolkit that readily will convert your MediaCenter recorded tv shows from MS-DVR format to .WMV. You can find this here - http://thegreenbutton.com/files/15/dvrms/entry112402.aspx

DVDs on Zune

Pocket DVD Wizard will convert DVDs to WMVs. In addition to converting it to WMV, it will also convert it for other players (i.e. ipod, psp). not to mention your pocketPC and smartphones. At $28, it's worth the price.

Find it here:

http://www.pocketdvdwizard.com/

TiVo on Zune?

I'm using Tivo Desktop to pull over some video files now. I'll post feedback on whether this works later in the week.