"Look What You Can Do with Silveright 2" Part 3: Introducing Deep Zoom

Today we covered Deep Zoom, based on Seadragon technology, which allows the users of our Silverlight application to navigate large amounts of visual information (images) regardless of the size of data and bandwidth available for downloading it.  A really cool implementation of Deep Zoom was introduced at Mix08 by Hard Rock Cafe (https://memorabilia.hardrockcafe.com).  We examined the Deep Zoom Composer, and discussed how it processes images and breaks them into lots of tiles and creates lower-res versions of them and tiles those.  We then took a look at how the output of the composer is wired up to our Silverlight application using the MultiScaleImage element.  Luckily for us, in the latest version of the Composer, we can have it generate all the wiring and Silverlight project for us, complete with Input (Mouse) handling!  I was going to post the project I created, but it came out to 85MB, so I decided against it.  The reason it's so big is because each image I imported into the Composer was 4MB, so when it did all the tiling and created lower res versions, it became very large.  I would have just uploaded the solution without all the images, but it wouldn't run (of course).  But since I didn't change any of the code you can do it yourself by creating your own project with the Deep Zoom Composer and outputting the images and Silverlight project.

Here some links to some Deep Zoom resources, keep in mind that a lot was changed with Silverlight Beta 2 and the new version of the Deep Zoom Composer, so walking through the steps outlined in the demos below won't work.

Expression Team Blog post on What's New in the Deep Zoom Composwer - https://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2008/06/07/what-s-new-in-deep-zoom-composer.aspx
Jaime Rodriguez's post on Deep Zoom (good stuff!) - https://blogs.msdn.com/jaimer/archive/2008/03/31/a-deepzoom-primer-explained-and-coded.aspx
Dan Water's video on getting started with DeepZoom - https://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=45278 (using Beta 1)
Deep Zoom Composer User Guide - https://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2008/03/05/deep-zoom-composer-user-guide.aspx (for Beta 1)
Mike Harsh's Mix Session on Silverlight 2 - https://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/archive/2008/03/05/slides-and-demos-from-my-mix-08-talk.aspx