Because the Silverlight 2 RC that was released is aimed primarily at developers wishing to update their projects to the final version of Silverlight 2 due out sometime this year, we didn’t provide an update to Deep Zoom Composer because most everyone who views Deep Zoom content will still be on Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

Instead, we have provided you with the updated project templates that are compatible with Silverlight 2 RC:

Download Updated Deep Zoom Composer Project Templates

Once you have downloaded the above ZIP file, extract its contents to your [Program Files]\Microsoft Corporation\Deep Zoom Composer\ folder. Your ZIP file contains an updated version of the DeepZoomProject folder, so your old files will be overwritten with your new ones.

Anyway, once you have overwritten your old files, if you run Deep Zoom Composer and preview your output via the Export view’s Silverlight tab, you should be able to see and interact with your Deep Zoom images.

Comment below if you are running into any issues or things just aren’t working.

Cheers!
Kirupa

Today, we have released a preview of Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 that allows you to create content for the release candidate of Silverlight 2. You can download the Service Pack from the following location:

Download Expression Blend 2 SP1 Preview

This Service Pack provides you with all of the functionality you had with our earlier Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview. Besides allowing you to create new projects for WPF, Silverlight 1, and Silverlight 2 RC, we are also exposing new platform functionality like Font Embedding / Subsetting for Silverlight 2 projects. More on this new functionality in future blog posts.

One thing to note, which is different from how we handled releases in the past, is that Expression Blend 2 SP1 Preview will install on top of Expression Blend 2. This will not be a side-by-side installation. This service pack is also an evolution of Expression Blend 2.5, so there will be no future Expression Blend 2.5 releases.

You can find more information on the FAQ page we have created for Expression Blend 2 / SP1.

Cheers!
Kirupa & the Expression Blend Team

In Expression Blend 2, when you choose to edit a code file or insert an event handler for an event, by default, Visual Studio will be launched. If you have multiple versions of Visual Studio (VS) installed, though, you may find that a different version of VS than the one you intended to open will get launched. The most common case is where you have both VS 2005 and VS 2008 installed, but VS 2005 gets launched by Blend instead of VS 2008.

The fix for this involves editing your registry. From the Run prompt (WinKey + R), type regedit and press enter:

With your Registry Editor now running, navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.DTE.9.0\CLSID. Copy the Value Data from this key:

With that value copied, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.DTE\CLSID, and overwrite its existing value with the data you just copied a few seconds.

This change should let Expression Blend know to launch Visual Studio 2008 instead of Visual Studio 2005.

Thanks,
Jeetendra “Jeetu” Kukreja

Since we released Deep Zoom Composer a while ago at MIX, we relied extensively on all of you to both create cool things using it as well as suggest new features for subsequent releases. Another major area that many of you have helped us with is documenting some of the cool things that you all have done with Deep Zoom.

In this post, I’ll try to point out some of the cool documentation to help you out in your deep zoom quest:

• Working with Collections & Deep Zoom Primer
  Jaime Rodriguez provides two great overviews on how Deep Zoom works and how you can manipulate the collections in greater detail.
   
• A Deep Zoom Blog
  Lutz Gerhard is one of the people responsible for Deep Zoom in Silverlight, and his blog provides valuable tips and tricks to the common asks people have made.
   
• Project Silverlight
  Wilfred Pinto has a lot of great examples dissecting various requests such as hit-testing on images, etc.
   
• Filtering by Tag
  Here is an example I wrote showing how you can use the Metadata.xml file generated by Deep Zoom Composer to filter.
   
• Deep Zoom Tag Cloud
  Craig Dunn extends my filtering example by generating a tag cloud based on the items – really cool!
   
• Deep Zoom : Selecting an Image
  Matthew Serbinski shows you how to bring a Deep Zoom image into focus when a thumbnail of that image has been selected.

If you have something really cool about Deep Zoom that you’ve written that I did not mention here, please send me an e-mail kirupac[at]microsoft.com, and I will look into adding it.

Cheers!
Kirupa :)