Friday, February 20, 2009

Download Deep Zoom Composer Technology Preview for Silverlight 2

February 2009 release

In parallel with the development of its alternative for Adobe Flash, Microsoft is also catalyzing the evolution of a tool intimately connected with Silverlight. The Deep Zoom Composer is a solution designed to take the traditional digital photo viewing experience via the web to the next level with the help of Silverlight. On February 17, 2009, Microsoft released the latest update to Deep Zoom Composer, with the February Technology Preview up for grabs, and weighing in at just 4.1 MB. The tool is set up to permit users to tailor images for Silverlight 2's Deep Zoom feature.

“The application itself contains only fixes to issues that you have reported (slightly better memory utilization, a fix for PNG transparency), but the DeepZoomTools.dll library has gone through some significant improvements. In a nutshell, if you had images that did not work properly in the earlier version of Deep Zoom Composer, you should find that most of those images should work now,” revealed Microsoft's Kirupa Chinnathambi.

In this context the February Technology Preview of the Deep Zoom Composer is nothing more than a minor release of the solution. Microsoft made available Silverlight 2 on October 13, 2008, at which time the software giant was applauding the high rate of adoption with the technology already running on one in four machines worldwide. At this point in time the Redmond company is focusing on the development of Silverlight 3, on which more details will be released in March 2009 at Microsoft's web-centric MIX09 conference.

“We are pleased to present a technology preview of Deep Zoom Composer, a tool to allow the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature currently being previewed in Silverlight 2. The new Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight allows users to see images on the Web like they never have before. The smooth in-place zooming and panning that Deep Zoom allows is a true advancement and raises the bar on what image viewing should be. High resolution images need to be prepared for use with Deep Zoom and this tool allows the user to create Deep Zoom composition files that control the zooming experience and then export all the necessary files for deployment with Silverlight 2,” Microsoft explained.

Deep Zoom Composer February 2009 Technology Preview is available for download here.