Sound Problems in Applications Developed Using Expression Blend

During the development of our Real project in Blend, we have entered the final phase of testing and installation at the client. Despite our recommendation to buy a machine with Windows Vista, a very nice Dell machine has been bought but with Windows XP, so we face various problems that will be the subject of another post, but this one seemed to me quite special and annoying enough to be published immediately.

The Problem: When installing the application developed with Blend Expression (August preview) and Visual Studio 2008, the sound effects associated with the StoryBoard were lost.

Although the files were in the same folder of the executable, with the same name, and with everything well created and configured, they were not executed when the moment came. Playing them separately they were sounding.

The solution: Searching the Internet we found that one of the workarounds detected in Blend (even published on the readme page on the internet that we did not read and that we attach the link to here: Blend) indicates that you must have version 10 of Windows media player or higher , so we downloaded version 11, and it worked perfectly, now our storyboards have audio. (and the most incredible thing, it is a control, it is animated, it has audio and it is a t-shirt!!!, I attach a photo, Juan Diego will talk more about the topic later, but the red t-shirt, over which flowers fall, the drums move and it has the sound, is a control, like a button or a list it has databind properties, and it is a vector graphic that does not pixelate at any size, a whole list of new features and technologies. -:)),

Corollary: To be able to install an application developed in Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2005 on an XP machine, this machine has to have the framework 3.0 installed, the above may not be very clear for everyone, but the component that allows to do the render of the XAML which is the graphic core of the application is only available from framework 3.0 onwards. In any case this is good news for us as developers because we can make applications with Blend that have very novel designs, interactivities and user experiences but that run (in general) on the installed base of users with XP SP2.

Questions: Analyzing this problem today with Juan Diego the doubt came to us about what will happen with silverligth, that is, if I put audio into a silverlight application and I do not have windows media player 10 or higher, will it not sound?, it will have to be tested.

I hope it will be of help, we spent several hours trying to find the cause of this behavior.

Juan Carlos Peláez

MCTS

Member of Microsoft Speaker Group Andino

Member of the Microsoft Colombia Influencer Group.

Keywords: Microsoft Expression Blend, Gattaca, Visual Studio, Framework 3.0, .Net, Windows XP, Audio, Sound, Windows Media Player, Problems, storyboard.