Ben Ramey

Thanks to Google caching, I got many posts back from my previous blog. All the ones I could find are back on the site with their original dates.

I’m thankful for Google cache!

If you try to do a SharePoint 2010 installation on your client machine (that is, not a Windows Server OS) then you’ll get an error explaining that SharePoint 2010 can’t be installed on your operating system.

Never fear, CodeProject is here. Check out this helpful post to get it installed (it couldn’t be easier): http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/44210/Installing-SharePoint-Server-2010-on-Windows-7-x64

Even the post is from 2009, it still works great.

For more detailed steps (including the ones outlined in the link above) following these instructions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ee554869.aspx

They will help you get the prerequisites installed as well.

As simple as it ended up being, it took me quite a while to figure out how to correctly add a simple overlaying graphic to a Brightcove video player yesterday.  It involves a couple of steps which I did not find clearly laid out anywhere I looked.  So, I thought a nice little step-by-step blog post would be helpful to anyone else looking for the same thing.

First, Brightcove has a nice and easy method (I say that because it looks easy…I didn’t try this method) of adding logo overlays to an individual video.  You just:

1. Log into your video cloud Brightcove Studio
2. Click on the Media icon in the top navigation bar
3. Find and select your video (by clicking on it)
4. Click on the Edit button at the bottom of the list of videos
5. Follow the process outlined on the Logo Overlay tab of the Edit popup

This isn’t what I wanted though.  I needed these videos to appear logo-free in certain instances.  So, the best solution was to use one player in the instance where I didn’t need a logo and then use a different player that included the logo overlay for my other scenario.  That required add an overlay to a player, not a video.

So, on to the solution!

Step One: Create a new player template

This part is easy.  Actually, all the parts are easy.  You just need to know what to do.

1. Under the Publishing tab in your Brightcove Studio, click on All Templates in the left sidebar.
2. Select one of the templates that Brightcove gives you and duplicate it (use the Duplicate button at the bottom of the list of templates)
3. Select your new template and click on the Edit button
4. In the Layout field (the XML that describes the player), add an Image element inside the Layout element.  See the BEML reference documentation for details.  Here is what my Image element looks like:

   <Image id="logoOverlay" width="50" height="50" scaleMode="exactFit" visible="{!videoPlayer.menu.open}"/>

   All of the attributes are optional except the id attribute.  It doesn’t have to be named “logoOverlay”, but you have to have something there.  Notice the value for my “visible” attribute.  This ensures that my logo disappears when the video is done and doesn’t awkwardly overlay any of the video menu UI elements.  Remove it if you want your logo to display the whole time.  Also note the “x” and “y” values.  Change these to your liking.  You might have to wait to finish Step Two below when you’ve added a logo and then you can test a video with your player to see where the logo fits best.  From there, you can keep adjusting your logo until you’re satisfied.

5. Now click on All Players in the left sidebar and then click on the New Player button at the bottom
6. Create a new player with whatever name is appropriate from the template you just created

That’s it for the template!  You’re done with Step One.

Step Two: Add Your Logo

I figured out step one all on my own pretty quickly.  I figured out step two all on my own too, but it look a lot longer!

1. Under the Publishing tab (you’re probably already there), click on All Players in the left sidebar
2. Select the player you just created in Step One and click on the Styles button at the bottom of the page.
3. If you gave your Image element an id (you should have!), then you should see an item underneath Editable Areas in the right sidebar with the same name as your Image id.  Click on it.
4. Just below (also in the right sidebar), you should now see an Image Selection tab in the Edit pane
5. Click on Upload and upload your logo (or whatever image).
6. Add a URL that the image links to and a tooltip to show when you hover over the image, if you want
7. Click on Save & Close

You’re done!  Now, any video you display with that player will have a logo overlay.

Hi! If you got here searching for any number of things (particularly having to do with SharePoint 2007/2010) and you’re wondering where that content went…well, it’s gone. I’m going to try to get it back, but I did something stupid in transferring my blog to another hosting account and lost my content from the previous account.

So, please be patient, use Google’s cache if need be and I’ll try to get things back in working order!

I recently had a situation where I needed to compare many XML files generated by a program of one version to the same set of XML files produced by a previous version of the same program. Unfortunately, the sets of XML files were formatted differently and so doing a file comparison with Beyond Compare (a GREAT file comparison tool, by the way) was going to be useless.

So, I started looking for a way to quickly format all the files in each set the same way with one program. I looked into using Notepad++ which has a great XML Tools plugin (look for it under Plugins > Plugin Manager). I tried combining the plugin’s formatting commands with a macro that would format the XML file, save it and close it. So, I could easily open the few hundred files I had to format in Notepad++ (one set at a time), then run the macro multiple times (Macro > Run a Macro Multiple Times…). This would run through each file until all were formatted and closed. However, after working with it for a while, I couldn’t get the Notepad++ macro system to actual perform the XML Tools plugin format command. The macro would successfully run, saving and closing the file. But, when I checked the files they had not been formatted. I worked with it for a while, but could not figure out what the matter was.

I knew the real solution had to be some type of command-line utility and a batch file. So, I started looking into that. The solution I ended up with was just that.

First of all, I found HTML Tidy which I could run from the Windows command line to format a file. Using a configuration file for the tidy.exe (placed in the same directory as tidy.exe and named tidcfg.ini–although neither matters, see below) that looked like this:

indent:yes
indent-attributes:yes

I got the formatting I wanted.

Now, all I had to do was brush up on my Windows batch command skills to run tidy.exe on multiple files. Easy enough! This is what my batch file looked like:

for /d %%X in (C:\<path_to_parent_directory>\*) do (c:\<path_to_tidy.exe>\tidy.exe -m -xml -config c:\<path_to_tidy.ini_file>\tidycfg.ini %%X\<xml_file_name>.xml)

I had a folder structure where there were hundreds of directories inside this one parent directory. Each of the child directories had a single XML file in it. Therefore, I needed the C:\<path_to_parent_directory>\* wildcard.

So, what this batch file does is simply look at each child directory (with the /d switch) in my parent directory. In each directory it runs (do) the tidy.exe program, tells it to modify the input file itself (-m) instead of saving the formatted XML to another file, tells it that the input file is valid XML (-xml) and then tells it where the tidycfg.ini file is (-config). Finally, it tells tidy.exe to take the current directory (%%X) and use the <xml_file_name>.xml file as the input file to format.

This little set up worked very well and quickly formatted all of my files in the same way so that I could successfully compare them with Beyond Compare.