Deep Zoom Technology – Microsoft and Adobe

I was absolutely blown away with a demonstration of Vertigo’s work on SilverLight Deep Zoom at Microsoft TechEd 2008. Vertigo won the Microsoft Partner of the Year award for Web Development for 2008. Their work on the Hard Rock Memorabilia website is testament to their awesome creativity and the clever use of the SilverLight Deep Zoom technology. 

Even the Barack Obama campaign is using Deep Zoom technology in the most creative of ways. 

Adobe’s Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow was quick to point out that the Deep Zoom feature was not a new concept in Flash. Zoomarama  takes Deep Zoom one step further with allowing you to create free, personal albums leveraging Adobe’s technology.

I cannot wait to get started with leveraging Deep Zoom at work. There are almost half a dozen web-based projects I can think of where I could have leveraged this technology to wow our customers.

Demystifying SilverLight (Updated)

Microsoft have released and renamed versions of SilverLight thereby causing some confusion. The below release timeline may help,

• SilverLight 1.0.20816 RTW (Release-to-Web): 05-Sep-2007
• SilverLight 1.1.20926.0 Alpha Refresh (re-christened SilverLight 2.0): 05-Sep-2007
• SilverLight 1.0.21115.0 Service Release: 20-Nov-2007 
• SilverLight 2.0 RTM is scheduled to be released at the end of 2008

I also hope the following perspectives help with understanding where the technology currently stands, what is envisaged and what licensing restrictions (if any) exist.

SilverLight 1.0 – Brief Architectural Perspective:

• A SilverLight 1.0 app invokes an embedded SilverLight control in a HTML web page that in turn locates and invokes a XAML file that contains the all-important Canvas object.
•  All other entities in a SilverLight app are hosted within the Canvas object.
• Each of these entities may have custom events associated to them.
• The event handlers are implemented by developers who can invoke the Canvas object DOM via JavaScript only.
• Data models are based on JSON and XML.   

SilverLight 1.0 – Licensing Restrictions: Free install as a plug-in for the browser. Browsers include IE 6 SP2, IE 7, FireFox and Safari. There is currently no support for Opera or Konqueror. 

SilverLight 2.0 – Brief Architectural Perspective:

•  Following Microsoft’s strategy for implementing WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere), SilverLight 2.0 is powered by atleast one running instance of a CoreCLR in a browser process, noting that there can be many more.
• The CoreCLR is basically a mini .NET Framework that is so portable, that it can be run in the browser. This makes the architecture more consistent and a developer’s life easier as s/he can now write code in VB.NET or C#. The inclusion of the LINQ API implies seamless ORM and a robust data access API. It must be noted that currently there is no LINQ to XML support within SilverLight 1.1 Alpha Refresh.
• Improving upon the scripting model in version 1.1, Microsoft have written managed wrappers for the Canvas object’s DOM access.  
• Data models can now be based upon RSS, POX, JSON and XML. 
• The SilverLight 2.0 Architectural Stack is as shown below:

 

SilverLight 2.0 – Licensing Restrictions:

• SilverLight 1.1 was re-christened to SilverLight 2.0 in late November 2007.
• SilverLight 2.0 is to be distributed as a free browser plug-in.
• Microsoft is to announce the SilverLight 2.0 Beta release during MIX ’08 in early March 2008.
• SilverLight 2.0 Beta 1 released on 05-Mar-2008.
• SilverLight 2.0 Beta 2 is scheduled to be released during the 2nd quarter of 2008.
• SilverLight 2.0 RTM is scheduled to be released at the end of 2008.
• Visual Studio 2008 requires a license for development.
• Visual Studio Tools for SilverLight is an empowering Visual Studio 2008 add-in that is currently (as of this writing) in Beta 1. Click here to download.