So... Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is finally out, and you can get it from here. And you can finally go live with a commercial project on this Beta 2 right now. Which means there are some breaking changes between this beta and the previous one. Of course a person was never meant to deploy anything important on the previous beta.

Not only do I have to recompile all my Silverlight 2 Beta 1 applications I also need to reprocess all my Deep Zoom Images as well. So I might as well go ahead and clear out my whole Silverlight Streaming folder and start afresh!

A new version of the Deep Zoom Composer has be released by the Expressions team, downloading it now to see what changes I need to make to my Deep Zoom exporter.

Ooooo... look, they have a prebuilt library now... hmmm, guess that more or less would make my program useless but we'll see after I finish downloading it.

For those of you who has been following my posts on Silverlight you'll know that as part of my journey to see how Silverlight ticks I tried to make a slideshow application. That essentially stopped the moment Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was released and I saw DeepZoom in action.

And after poking around with it for the past week, and reading up the stuff over at Wilfred Pinto's blog I have succeeded in creating a... hmmm.. DeepZoom Photo Album for lack of a better word.

Here check out a little sample here.

It probably needs some more work, performance wise one important tweak would be to NOT fill up the whole browser window with the DeepZoom image at the start, since the user's browser window might be oh.. 3046 pixels wide? :P But anyway.. Silverlight 2 itself is still in Beta so there's a chance there might be some more changes in the future so I'll just keep everything as it is first. Anyway if you find performance slow.. ZOOM OUT, or resize the browser window to a smaller size. The SIZE of the display area determines how LARGE an image will be used for display.

And more importantly for those of you who are interested in actually creating something like this.. I have something for you. The sample you see above? It was generated by a program...

Which you can get it off my SkyDrive here

A bit of warning though.. the program.. pretty rough at the edges (heck it doesn't even come with an install program!), it was made for my own consumption first, and also.. it relies on 2 other pieces of BETA software which is the Microsoft DeepZoom Image Composer and Silverlight 2.0 (Install the appropriate runtime for your platform), so be sure to install those 2 things first before you even try to run this program. The program was made with the .Net Framework 2.0, which if you don't have that installed when you try to install DeepZoom you'll be directed to the appropriate place to get it.

Oh, and you'll need an account over at Silverlight Streaming to host the album if you don't run your own server.

I'll make a more specific err... instructions post later but the generic flow of the program is.

1. Press the ADD button to add pictures to the album
2. For each picture you can type in a caption.
3. Then press the PUBLISH (disk icon) to save the album
4. If everything goes well you'll get an uploadme.zip file in your target folder. Upload that to the Silverlight Streaming service.
5. Consume the application in your blog using the IFRAME tag.

Since most of the code was retrieved from the public domain I'll upload it to CodePlex once I figure out how it works.

From the MS Expressions team blog, I found this blog of Wilfred Pinto doing some testing into Silverlight 2.0 he has some great posts of what he's been doing so far looking into the DeepZoom control. And given the fact that MS hasn't finalized the Silverlight 2.0 documentation, is a great resource for anyone playing around with the DeepZoom control.

After reading about Deep Zoom Collections I quickly converted the WZ montage to a collection to see how well it worked out. The immediate thing I noticed was that the collection was much smaller, 27MB instead of 75MB.

So immediately I uploaded the ZIP file into Silverlight Streaming, but I was presented with an Invalid Filetype error. Some snooping around found me the solution which was to remove all .SDI files from the images folder and viola..

A better sized WZ Deep Zoom Montage, hopefully the next time I put up a DeepZoom image, it'll have better controls in place :P

So, the previous example of using the DeepZoom feature of Silverlight 2.0 wasn't exactly great and didn't show the potential of the function. But now.. here's a better example. First of all if you don't have Silverlight 2.0 installed yet.. go install it first cause Silverlight Streaming doesn't yet properly automated the Beta's installation.

The demo is here, it'll open up in a new window. Controls are still simple cause I have no time to change the previous code, so.. Click and Drag to move around the picture, Left Click to Zoom In, Shift + Left Click to Zoom Out.

Silverlight 2.0 has achieved Beta 1 status, with a Go Live license it means we can use it for actual sites... interesting.

And... finally there's Windows 2000 support, but on Windows 2000 the plugin only works for IE6 and not Firefox. hmmm.... can't win them all I guess, and it's better than not being able to run at all.

Time to see what I can do with this...

I'm almost done with my little Silverlight Slideshow application, just have one irritating bug to take care off first. In the mean time, here's a sample of the output, basically you either embed in your blogs like such.

God.. such a blast from the past. Or you can give a link to the app so only those who know the URL can see the slide show for example:-

http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/5089/mywedding/iframe.html

Pretty neat when all you want to do is to show people some pictures. I just have a few more bugs to work out before I can release this to the general public, but if you're interested in trying it out WITH NO SUPPORT AT ALL!!! Knock yourselves out with it.

So here's tonight's progress. Give it a quick run through before continuing reading.

The cheesy looking title slide is in because one of the typical usage scenarios of this slideshow app is to be used in blog posts, if all the images of ALL the slideshows on a single page are downloaded without user interaction that'd be a waste of bandwidth.

The controls now have a lead header to show users that there's something waiting for them at the bottom of application.

Thumbnails are loaded first, then upon first viewing of the thumbnail the full version is queued for download.

This concludes my Silverlight exercise.

For now...