YouTube Clones for All, Courtesy of Microsoft

YouTube clones for all, courtesy of Microsoft. This perspective, although it might seem somewhat far fetched, is actually close to taking contour. And the Redmond company, together with Vertigo Software, made one step closer to such scenarios, having updated Video.Show to Release Candidate 1.0 stage. Vertigo Software is the development company that has put together an "end-to-end reference-quality sample for user-generated video content" as a project commissioned by Microsoft and centered around the Silverlight technology.

Video.Show went live in mid November. The concept behind it is rather simple. Video.Show is designed to do all the heavy lifting in building a video community website. Until now, in beta, Video.Show has evolved into the first Release Candidate stage bringing to the table a range of improvements.

"Role management, allowing for hosted installations in which new users do not have upload rights. Users now fall into one of three categories: untrusted users (not able to upload videos); trusted users (who also have the "upload user" right), and an administrator role. Basic debugging information is written to the database when video processing (encode, upload to Silverlight Streaming) fails. [And] general code cleanup, commenting, and bug fixes," revealed Tim Sneath, Microsoft group manager for client platforms.

With this update for Video.Show, Microsoft has also introduced support for the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008. The beta build of Video.Show was designed to integrate with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. Sneath added that the final release of Video.Show is on the horizon.

"We're close to releasing this as a production-quality sample. We're currently doing a security audit on the code to make sure there aren't any nasty SQL injection-type issues. As mentioned above, we're also working on some documentation and other pieces; we're doing some componentization work to make it easier to swap various pieces out (e.g. to replace the Silverlight Streaming hosting with a local IIS / Windows Media Server-based hosting model)," Sneath added.