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.

The decision to get a video camera was pretty simple for me.. before my son arrived I HAD to get one. And so far it's been great capturing all the things he done, pictures and photos are nice but video is just something you want to have around too!

After some people knew I bought a Sony A350 they had some pretty strong responses. Some of them started arguing that the Nikon D300 and the Canon 450D offered LiveView as well and were generally better cameras than the Sony A350. In order to silence such arguments I knew I had to come out with a comparison of the Live View performance of the A350 and the other cameras. I already had access to a Nikon D300 which my semi pro friend has, so I was ready to record a video with him when I learnt that another friend had recently bought a Canon 450D.

And thus.. the results..

Hopefully now people will stop telling me that the Canon 450D and Nikon D300 has LiveView AF just as good as the Sony A350, because they don't! I'm not saying that the other cameras suck, they're great cameras. But like I mentioned I bought the A350 for the LiveView, not about the wide variety of lenses, or other features. The other cameras are so complicated my wife would just grumble and complain if I asked her to take a picture, and I do want to have my picture taken with WZ at times! :P

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.

So now that WZ is wearing shoes he finally gets to walk around in the shopping complexes.

He seems to be enjoying his little adventures. Of course it also means that..

Mommy now has extra work to drag WZ away from the interesting stuff. So now that WZ can walk around he can be dropped in the babies toys aisle at Toys R Us and there are lots and lots of buttons on Try Me toys for him to push.

Of course, so much running around just means WZ nods off sooner.