At Mix08 one of the components of Silverlight 2 I was most intrigued by was the multi-scale image technology called “Deep Zoom” (formerly seadragon). The demos we saw were quite compelling. Immediately I thought of areas where our clients could improve their users interactive experiences through this new technology.

Below you will find my first attempt at using the technology. It took about 10 min to create and showcases an interesting example of composition using deep zoom.

(Hint: Look for the plane in the right part of the sky)

Attached you will find my sample project. It is pretty big in size with the full collection of image tiles. All of the code you see in the page.xaml.cs was taken from Scott Hanselmans blog on Deep Zoom where he leveraged the Mousewheel class written by
Pete Blois

The image of the flags I took last summer and in the original there is a small speck in the sky where I believe a plane was. I found a image of an F16 on the internet and used Photoshop to remove its original background. I replaced it with a sample of the color of the flag photos sky. Using Deep Zoom Composer I placed the new F16 photo over the sky speck and exported the collection.

Code: DeepZoomFlag.zip
(Note: to get the sample to work you will need to edit the absolute path to the collection in the page.xaml file)

Even though Mix08 is now only a distant memory, the inspiration I leave with will last for quite a while.  There is something quite powerful about being around thousands of professionals that are as passionate and enthusiastic about the future of interactive development.  For months now I have had the special opportunity to be working close with Microsoft and the there development of the Silverlight 2 Beta.  We have seen first hand the power and potential of the platform. It was great to share that excitement with the rest of the development community.

In the weeks to come, I look forward to sharing our discoveries as we learned how to leverage the Silverlight 2 framework to build our most recent casual game.  Look for posts on the techniques and methodologies we found most effective.