Bloody Beta Releases

Man, I knew better than this but I still went ahead with it. I'd spent a while working with Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and just as everything was working nicely what happens? Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is released and, oh what's that? Everythings f***king broken now! Even the Deep Zoom images. Oh, and the Silverlight player requires an update to play the new stuff (natch) but it will no longer play beta 1 content... WTF!? I also had to uninstall and reinstall the Deep Zoom Composer and update Expression Blend. Here's another poor sucker who was mucking about with Beta 1 and has had to rejig all their code. I think I'll just wait for the RTM release before touching it again.

Automate Silverlight Deep Zoom Composer

At Remix08 one of the presenters mentioned a Deep Zoom API which sounded just grand and perfect for something I was working on. I just had a quick search for said API and it apparently doesn't exist (yet) but according to one of the other presenters there on the day you can hook directly into the guts of the Deep Zoom Composer to do it your own way (with a bit of fiddling).

Just to prove it works, the Live Labs guys have created their own demo site called PhotoZoom that lets you generate Deep Zoomable images on the fly.