Designer WPF

Have you heard about Deep Zoom?

No… it is not a porno filmed exclusivly with the Canon 5200mm mirror lens (although that would actually be kind of kinky), it is Microsoft’s new, dangerously named technology for taking huge pictures and making them completely zoomable over the internet through Silverlight.

“How huge?” you may ask. Well, I don’t know if there is a hard limit, but the biggest one I saw was 14 petabytes. 

Petabytes. With a “p”. 

Basically, take your bedroom, and fill it top to bottom with those nifty little 500GB external back-up hard drives. And you can see any part of that image almost instantly by simply zooming in on the part you want to see.

To see a demo, you can look at the Hard Rock memorabilia page.

Well, with proper thanks to Robby Ingebretsen, Microsoft has released the Deep Zoom Composer, which allows us normal people to make and implement these kinds of super-zooming interfaces.

I’ll be working on it in the coming weeks and I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Silverlight 2.0 had a Beta release today and I’m currently sitting in the second of two talks about creating rich internet applications with Silverlight. The talk is being done by Joe Stegman and Mike Harsh.

 The thing that I’m getting really excited about is the extent to which Silverlight 2.0 XAML actually looks and acts just like WPF XAML. I’ll start looking at Silverlight in the future and posting on it as I figure it out.

 If you are brave and daring, however, you can head over to Mike’s post on the talk where he links to all of the files his project is built on.

By the way, if you want to work with Silverlight in Visual Studio or Expression Blend (and I wouldn’t reccomend doing it any other way), you’ll need to download the Silverlight 2.0 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 and the Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview.

I’ve installed them and glanced at them and they are really cool… major steps forward for Silverlight.

 More later.