Nigel Parker's Outside Line : EFAS

Expression For Art’s Sake – 3 1/2 Day Silverlight 3 Camp – Wellington, NZ

nparker — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:29:00 GMT

There’s no better way to try a new technology than getting people together to learn, share and build on top of it. So, that’s what we’ve been doing with Silverlight and Expression Studio for the last couple of years: Inviting a board array of developers and designers (you) to come spend time with us.

The Aussies held their event last December, so now it was New Zealand’s turn!

Tim has already written about Expression For Art’s Sake that took place in Wellington from the 20th to 23rd of April last month and now it is my turn to provide some more detail.

At the highest level I organised this event to get developers and designers of all different experience levels working together to get hands on with Blend 3 and Silverlight 3.

For those of you with short attention spans I have created a “super fast” overview video highlighting the 30 hours of workshop in just seven minutes!

For every one else here is a one hour summary video of the first two and a half days (download).

The Group Dynamics

3 Master Trainers

Tim Heuer, Arturo Toledo, Zef

The Teams (17 companies, 33 people)

Click Suite – Cam, Pieter
Datacom – Ben, David, Ronald
Datacraft – Dom, Mark
Gen-i – Craig, Tim
ICE Interactive –Nigel, Melissa
Intergen – Raymond, Andrew
Marker Studio – Darren, Keith
NV Interactive – Brent, Nadia
Phosphor Essence – Aaron, Toby
Provoke – Callum, Isha
Pure Direction – Grant, Darko, Dave
Signify/MSO Design – Charles, Stacey
TePapa – Tim
Y&R/ Microsoft – Vikki, Aditia, Samuel, Kris
Xero - Jeff, Kirk

Challenge #1 – Build a “Hello World” in Silverlight and deploy it to a production web server.

This was a fun activity as introduced an element of “chaos” in securing the domain name for each team. I wanted to introduce teams to the WebPI and present a task that they may not carry out in their own organisations.

The servers that were “claimed”:

Click Suite – http://leacha.bility.co.nz
Datacom – http://ina.bility.co.nz
Datacraft – http://no.bility.co.nz
Gen-i – http://separa.bility.co.nz
ICE Interactive – http://dura.bility.co.nz
Intergen – http://opposa.bility.co.nz
Marker Studio – http://a.bility.co.nz
NV Interactive – http://surviva.bility.co.nz
Phosphor Essence – http://mova.bility.co.nz
Provoke – http://naviga.bility.co.nz
Pure Direction – http://capa.bility.co.nz
Signify/MSO Design – http://lika.bility.co.nz
TePapa – http://staina.bility.co.nz
Y&R/ Microsoft – http://via.bility.co.nz
Xero - http://lia.bility.co.nz

Getting To Know Each Other – WEREWOLF!

What is a few lynched villagers amongst friends?

Challenge #2 – Developing a Mobile Phone for a Kiwi

The challenge here was to start to think about the design process and work together under pressure to present a brief.

Here is a sample of the designs that the teams came up with:

Challenge #3 – Develop a Calculator with a User Control

What were the “New Features” of Silverlight 3 that the teams used most in the Projects?

Designers:

Developers

From here we moved onto projects that would lead to teams Final Presentations.

Some of the teams put their solutions online for you to try.

Silverlight 2 Projects available to try online:

Click Suite – http://leacha.bility.co.nz

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed you can try the Silverlight 3 projects online as well.

Gen-i – http://separa.bility.co.nz
ICE Interactive – http://dura.bility.co.nz/#Recipes
Intergen – http://opposa.bility.co.nz
Marker Studio – http://a.bility.co.nz
Pure Direction – http://capa.bility.co.nz (Login test/ password)
TePapa – http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/
Y&R/ Microsoft – http://via.bility.co.nz/Bliss/
Xero - http://lia.bility.co.nz/MapTest1TestPage.aspx

Also available is the y&soft blingulator.

Final Presentations:

I have made a video that highlights the final presentations (download). All in all the teams did an awesome job going from zero to hero and surviving this very intense, compact training environment.

I have also combined both videos using Smooth Streaming as well.

Online Feedback from the attendees:

Tim wrote:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

Darko wrote:

All in all I think it was a very successful week. Everyone learned a lot and the mentoring from Tim and Arturo helped heaps. If I could improve anything, it would be to make it a day longer just so that there is a proper wind down. I’m really looking forward to working with Silverlight more.

GREAT WORK everybody!

NZsynth – How It Was Done

nparker — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:10:26 GMT

Previously I wrote and demoed the NZsynth application that was built for the WEB09 keynote. This post is detailing how it was made and introducing version two (Zoom all the way in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image).

WATCH THE VIDEO that goes end-to-end on the development of the application (mainly building the mosaic and the extension that Tim Tate created to make the tiles clickable).

The video is also downloadable from Channel9

The Code

It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demo ware and should be treated as such.

Flickr Image Download Code

Mosaic WCF REST Service (Including Flickr Database File)

NZsynth

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/ Hot keys in previous post

Tim’s Silverlight 3 Code and Demo

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/ to look at a running version of Tim’s solution.

NZsynth V2 Source (excluding image tiles)

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/nzsynth (Zoom right in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image)

Key tools

WEBPI to install Visual Studio Silverlight Development Tools & SQL Server 2008 Express
AndreaMosaic
HD Make
Deep Zoom Composer
WCF REST Starter Kit
FlickrNet

Other Resources/ Examples

Jellyfish Deep Zoom
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL
My post DeepZoom-Tastic
http://tr.im/photosEFAS (DeepZoom Pix Photos from Expression for Art’s Sake)
Miss March and Other Distractions (Parental Advisory)
Deep Zoom++ : Build Dynamic Deep Zoom Applications with Open Source

All this got me thinking how this idea could be extended further?

National Geographic have been doing some interesting work with photosynth recently. Check out the Sphinx below.

This is why I was intrigued to see they too have developed a mosaic experience called Infinite Photograph. It is not as smooth or free flowing as the nzsynth mosaic demo but it has a great touch that it repeats on itself after a few layers giving you a “feeling” that you can zoom forever. Also double-clicking images brings up more details like in Tim and my examples.

I guess beyond this we then need to think about video and using dynamic frames in a form of “massive” stop motion animation. If you haven’t seen it yet the YouTube Mosaic Music Video may give you some insight into where my mind is heading.

ACP Media Development Leads To Pure Direction

nparker — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:32:00 GMT

I have been working with the team at ACP Media for a couple of years and finally at the Expression For Art’s Sake event at Wellington a couple of weeks ago I had a chance to catch up with Dave Harvey, Grant Archibald and Darko Zoroja to discuss their work with Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC and jQuery.

Check out the video that I shot on location at the Expression For Art’s Sake event in Wellington. In the video the guys talk about their first “Silverlight 1” development integrating video into the Auto Trader website.

Followed by a “New Car” area of the site built with ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Silverlight 2 DeepZoom (Based on the JellyFish engine).

Try out both the premium Silverlight version:

And the comparative jQuery version:

The latest site that they guys launched just this week is AA Carfair. It is based on the Auto Trader back-end and is built completely from the ground up again using ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Silverlight Video.

The guys have chosen to form a new company specialising in Silverlight development called Pure Direction which has just became a NZ BizSpark start-up, best of luck for your new venture and I look forward keeping up with your new developments.