Recently I was asked how to display Rich media (mainly video) in Sharepoint 2007 by our communications department. This shouldn't be too hard to do so time to whip up a quick demo/proof of concept to make sure that it in fact can be done, and what better way than to create a custom web part that embeds Microsoft's Silverlight.

Adding Silverlight to your web application is easy enough so it shouldn't be too difficult to do in Sharepoint 2007 either. There are a few different files that you will need in order to do this however, a couple of Javascript files, a XAML and of course your custom web part.

So kick off Visual Studio and lets get cracking.

I was tasked with a dual problem the other day and with the help of the Virtual Earth interactive SDK, managed to complete the task in only a matter of a couple of hours.

The first thing to do was to try and get the Virtual Earth map displayed within a web part. That should be easy enough, just get a Site Viewer web part and point to local.live.com. Unfortunately this doesn't actually work, all you get is a blank web part.

OK so what now? Well since we want to eventually manipulate the map ourselves, we really want to host the Virtual Earth map on our own server (kindof), so the next thing I tried was to simply create a new website on the MOSS (Microsoft Office Server Systems - the new name for Sharepoint Server) server, assign it a unique port number and then create a new web application in there that simply uses the VE SDK and displays a map onto an aspx page.