On Monday, Clemens Vasters presented a session on going from HTML to services. He touched on all the acronym buzzwords (AJAX, RSS, SOAP, REST, WS-*) and how to utilize them best to open your web application as a consumable service. The talk really got interesting when Clemens moved into the demo portion.

See, Clemens recently joined Microsoft. At some point in the near future, Clemens will be moving from his home in Germany to the land of coffee shops and grunge music. Although Clemens is looking forward to the move, he isn’t looking forward to not being able catch his beloved football (soccer) team in action. So, Clemens took the bull by the horns and solved a real world problem. How do you watch German television from half-way around the world? Well, if you’re Clemens, you use a combination of messaging technologies to build your own personal media streaming application.

He has a Windows Media Center server in place at his parent’s house in Germany that he’s using as a service to browse the programming guide and select which programs he’d like to record. Oncea program has been recorded, he’s able to stream the recordings down to his computer through Windows Media Player. Another cool aspect of the demo was that Clemens built a web page with some uses of AJAX and RSS that lives right in the Windows Media Player that gives him control to his programming guide within the player itself. Very cool demo.

If you’re interested in learning more about the application, head on over to http://www.newtellivision.tvto check it out.

Tag: MIX06