A few weeks back on MIX'08 Microsoft showed us a stunning demo including new technologies like Seadragon and Silverlight 2.0.

This demo showed us the collection of memorabilia at Hardrock Cafe. The demo can be found at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

This demo really got my attention and after some searching on the internet i found out i wasn't the only one. There are hundreds of blogposts by people showing how you can build this for yourself and guess what: it's really easy!

I've spend some days in the weekend and this evening building my own version of a Silverlight Deepzoom Application. Most of my code is "borrowed" or copied from other blog posts which i'll list at the bottom of this post. My goal was to also be able to show metadata at the pictures and after some research it wasn't to hard to do this either. Since i didn't find any other blog posts who explained how to show metadata with your pictures i'll make a seperate blogpost about this tomorrow.

I've put some of my last vacation photo's online in my own deepzoom test application at: http://www.vdcruijsen.net/projects/SilverlightDeepzoom/test.html (source also linked on that page)

Download Source: 

As i said before i won't go explaining the code in this post because i'm gonna do that tomorrow in a separate post where i'll explain how to add metadata to your deepzoom application. if you want more information about Silverlight and Deepzoom check out the following links:

how it works: http://blogs.msdn.com/jaimer/archive/2008/03/31/a-deepzoom-primer-explained-and-coded.aspx

lots of how-to's: http://projectsilverlight.blogspot.com/

more info on silverlight 2.0 http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx

Another cool thing i found out is that Microsoft is offering is a hosted environment for your silverlight applications. You can get up to 10GB of free space at Silverlight Streaming: http://silverlight.live.com/

You can upload your Silverlight manifest files + other resource files like video's to Silverlight Streaming and you can link your silverlight object on your own page. The silverlight object in my own example is also hosted at Silverlight Streaming.

If you have any questions or recommendations about this subject please dont hesitate to send me a mail about it.

Geert van der Cruijsen