Senior Project - Longview

Electric Rain is a leading provider of 3D multimedia software products and is also an elite technology partner of Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program (TAP). Electric Rain seeks to use the advantages of the upcoming version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Windows Vista, to create a new screen recording software application targeting the eLearning and demo software markets.

Currently, there are no applications capable of capturing and playing back demos of media-rich Windows applications without the use of bitmap recording. Bitmap recording essentially takes a series of snapshots, in the form of a bitmap image, of a running application and animates them to create a movie. These current solutions suffer from a number of issues, including large file sizes and an inability to scale playback to different output sizes. No practical solution has been available to date because the graphics and screen-drawing architectures of the existing Windows operating systems are limited.

Windows Vista uses a unified presentation subsystem (known as the Windows Presentation Foundation) within a new Windows framework (known as WinFX) that does away with much of the old bitmap-based architecture. In its stead is a system that emphasizes the use of scalable vector graphics, defined in a new application markup language known as XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language), a markup language for describing a user interface.

This project seeks to leverage this new system to allow developers to create scalable and accurate demos of WinFX-based applications with small file sizes. The software is composed of three modules. Recording functionality is embedded in an application to be recorded. Recorded content can be edited in an editor where annotations can be added to highlight or clarify the recording. Finally, a player was developed to play back the recording with any additions from the editor. The system was developed in C#.