Nigel Parker's Outside Line : ria

UNPLUGGED – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 3

nparker — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:25:00 GMT

I have previously written about the UNPLUGGED road trip that Mike, Nathan and I have been on.

I also mentioned that I would be making a screen cast and sharing the source code from the Silverlight 3 Line of Business demo that I delivered. The demo that I presented was based on Scott Morrison’s two sessions from Tech.Ed North America.

Watch a video of my session using Smooth Streaming.

Also on Channel 9…

The source code for these presentations is available below (includes activity control):

I also updated my presentation to cover the May release of RIA Services from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices (this site also includes tutorials and white papers).

I will do another post shortly on how I built the Tech.Ed Tweet Vote demo that I showed in the first part of my UNPLUGGED session.

Other Posts that are worth checking out:

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.

Web On The Piste

nparker — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:12:00 GMT

Last year at WOTP I posted about the Web Jam and the Dystro/ Glenn stuff.

This year it was fun to head back to Queenstown and reflex on another years worth of development on our RIA platforms.

It was fantastic to team up with Michael Kordahi DG for the first time at an event.

There was a strong team representing the MS side of the house thanks to Tatham Oddie, Jose Fajardo and Chris Auld for their top notch sessions.

Surprisingly the conference was both more developer and UX focused than last year steering clear of media and interface design.

Without Matt Voerman and Scott Barnes in attendance this year the Blue v Red aspect of the Microsoft/ Adobe panel discussion didn't have quite the venom. Pip from Gruden commented on the WOTP blog...

"Great panel discussion yesterday evening, Microsoft and Adobe playing (marginally) happily together for a great session"

I'm looking forward for this to go online so I can remember what I actually said!

Michael delivered a killer keynote on the second day which should also be up on the web on the piste website shortly. He had prepared it previously for the Australia partner conference and it was the perfect fit for this conference as well.

Chris introduced the Runtime Page Optimizer that the actionthis.com team has built. RPO drops into the integrated pipeline in IIS7 to dynamically perform yslow optimizations on a web site at runtime. It does this by combining .js, css into single files and builds out css sprites. If you are hosting on Windows from New Zealand I highly recommend taking the beta for a spin as it vastly improves latency for your ASP.NET or PHP website.

Speaking of Web Servers I am also very impressed with Tatham's ability to demonstrate PHP running on IIS7 using FastCGI, then integrating with an ASP.NET application before finally load balancing the whole application between two servers in a high availability, automatic failover cluster all in less than 8 minutes, check out his screencast!

My webjam this year was to build a panoramic deepzoom of Queenstown and I only used half of the 5 minutes allocated!

Check out the screencast below of the steps involved and download the August update of deepzoom composer to try it out for yourself.

Both mine and Michael's resulting panoramic deepzooms are below.

Also I created a Queenstown Photosynth as well.

Paul Lo did a great job as roaming reporter for the event a produced the following video...

I'll also leave you with a couple of episodes of DG TV from the event.

See you at Tech.Ed next week.