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Online Article: Multimedia Control

If you've ever tried to find classes in the .NET Framework that allow you to play audio and video, you may have noticed the gaping hole where this functionality should be.If you think Microsoft has finally gotten around to fixing this glaring omission in version 2 of the framework, you're only partially correct. While some basic audio capabilities will be provided (as described later in this article,) they still leave a lot to be desired. On the other hand, the free MediaPlayer component provided with this article demonstrates a more feature-rich solution to your multimedia needs-and it's compatible with all versions of the .NET Framework.

Playing audio and video is easier in version 2 of the framework, but the basic capabilities available still leave a lot to be desired. Fortunately, the free MediaPlayer component provided with this article demonstrates a more feature-rich solution to your multimedia needs—and it's compatible with all versions of the .NET Framework.

Although this article doesn't explore much of the eye-candy Silverlight features such as animations, my real focus here is to provide readers with a small, working proof-of-concept that explores the use of Silverlight as part of a multimedia exam suite. The initial idea was to create a simple exam suite, but it soon evolved to a multimedia exam suite, where you can assign a video to each question in the exam, thanks to Youtube flexibility in providing a small player which can be embedded inside your html (and fortunately, inside your Silverlight applications).

Updated IDE features, new Menu, Toolstrip and multimedia controls, support for background threading, and a new deployment technology called ClickOnce aimed squarely at reducing the number of Web-based intranet applications are among the new capabilities in Visual Studio 2005.