So i'm over in tokyo for a quick visit and had a blast checking out all the Silverlight video stuff that is going on in this market; we have some amazing partners going live in the coming weeks/months.  Here at the airport killing time i thought I would try to post some Silverlight video of my kids eating Chicken Feet and Chicken Head at a tasty roadside restaurant in Beijing last week.  I was blown away at how easy it is with Expression Encoder.  I used a template that is good for blogs (has a huge PLAY button in the middle of the video on load of the page), and an add-in for Windows Live Writer created by james clark which makes brain-dead simple to instantiate a Silverlight application off of the Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service.  With this free service you get 4gigs of free app hosting, that can be video or it could be a full app/RIA... the hosting is off of our microsoft CDN backbone, so the performance even here in tokyo is super slick.

Pretty sweet mr. james clark.. check out his blog for more on this magic.

It's funny, this blog started off with my visit to China earlier this year, and here I am making my first update in a belated long summer, back in China, but this time, as a resident alien!  My family and I just moved here, we are living in "the most important city in the world" (as some are calling it)--Beijing.  I'm joining the team over here to help out with the Microsoft UX business.  I'll be living in China but working with Korea, Japan, India, Australia, and other geographies in the region--there is so much vibrancy to the cultures, the business community, and of course, for the internet and web business.

This summer summarized in 1 paragraph = shipping Silverlight 1.0 was a blast, and the momentum in the market is awesome... we've got amazing partners lining up worldwide, and i'm really psyched to be over here in Asia where 40%+ of broadband connections exist and the growth and excitement in the market is second to none.  Going to be fun! 

Here's a picture of me and the kids eating our first of many dim sum meals in town--my 6 year old said "this dim sum is like 10x better than Seattle's", and he is of course underplaying the divide!  Oh-my-god, the "chinese" food back home is indeed a different beast completely from what we've enjoyed here in just our first week.  I'm taking pictures of all the food we eat, plan on making a Silverlight widget of "food forest has eaten in china" for one of my killer demos some day!

PS: Using Windows Live Writer new beta--at last, red squiggly lines for misspelled words--ahh, technology is wonderful!