Then look no further at this healthcare demonstrator from friend and colleague Martin "Larry" Grayson...

There's been some really useful updates to the DeepZoom Composer that means that it will now generate some boilerplate code - a web page and a bunch of mouse and keyboard event handling so you can enjoy your compositions right away.

That's very useful by itself, but it also means that it suddenly becomes very easy to host your composition on Silverlight Streaming. Here's how:

Sign up for a Silverlight Streaming account if you don't have one.

Next, create your composition in DeepZoom Composer. Once you're happy with it, you can run the Export, and 'Preview in Browser'.

If you've accepted the export defaults, then you'll typically find the output web project, XAML and code at:

C:\Users\<User>\Documents\Expression\Seadragon Projects\<My Project Name>\source images\OutputSdi\<My Export Name>\

Using the solution in this folder means you can edit the output and maybe make something more complex, or integrate with another application.

But for upload into Silverlight Streaming, we can look in a folder further down the folder tree:

C:\Users\<User>\Documents\Expression\Seadragon Projects\<My Project Name>\source images\OutputSdi\<My Export Name>\DeepZoomOutput_Web\ClientBin

This folder contains the compiled XAP file, and a folder with all of the generated images from DeepZoom Composer. First, we need to add a file that Silverlight Streaming understands: Manifest.xml.

The Manifest.xml file should look something like follows (where source, width and height should be set as desired):

<SilverlightApp>
  <version>2.0</version> 
  <source>DeepZoomOutput.xap</source> 
  <width>1400</width> 
  <height>1400</height> 
  <background>white</background> 
  <isWindowless>false</isWindowless> 
  <framerate>24</framerate> 
</SilverlightApp>

Once this file is added, before zipping, my folder looks like:

Now we can zip together the Manifest.xml, XAP file, and images folder, and we're good to upload to Silverlight Streaming, and then to embed the content into blog pages.

Here's one I made earlier.

Through the magic of DeepZoom, you can zoom into Simon's eye and see what he's really thinking...

(Dammit Jim, I'm a tech not a photographer)

It was great to see ITV use Silverlight to provide their live channel streaming and catch-up TV services for the Mac audience. I think it's really interesting that they chose to reach out to a Mac audience using latest Microsoft technology and it's a great demonstration of the cross-platform capabilities of Silverlight.

Silverlight is also used if you're running Firefox on your PC too.

You can see reports at Macworld and there's also at Automated Home.

Now I know that GTA is not to everyone's tastes but I'm a computer game nut. So, I need to extol its virtues as a game (regardless of subject matter).

And it is awesome. I'm only a couple of hours into the game, but from the off, the feeling that you're in a high quality experience is right there thanks mainly to the opening titles. From there it's the big things: sprawling city, great graphics that attract, but then the small things: humour in the branding and characters which smack of quality down to the tiny details: the "dit-dit-dit" signal from the mobile phone interfering with the radio just before it rings that put the icing on the cake.

Ace.

I quite enjoyed Architect Insight this year - lots of useful sessions, and in particular the keynotes - which were mainly thinking about the issues surrounding the delivery and scaling of cloud services - were engaging and interesting.

If you were there, hopefully you enjoyed my session with Paul Dawson from Conchango - thanks very much Paul! - thinking about user experience for consumers and enterprise users.

The main things I took away this year:

• AtomPub is important. There's a lot of standardisation of Microsoft services on AtomPub and it seems to me that it will be increasingly important to understand and use this.
• POA. A new acronym: "Pod-Oriented Architecture". A Pod is defined as a unit in a datacenter capable of running an entire cloud service. So, to scale out, you just keep adding new pods.
• Brewer's Conjecture. This is the notion that one of Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance has to be traded away when designing distributed/cloud systems.
• Simon Thurman's 20/20 (20 slides lasting 20 seconds each) format session was very successful.
• Thinking about the use of cloud services from an enterprise perspective is a challenge.

I've mentioned that I think there is probably some use in Twitter somewhere before. The jury is still out on this for me. On the one hand, tweeting is very useful as a broadcast mechanism beyond bulk email with less need for context than blogging. But on the other hand, it's hard to follow more than one or two people. So, the value of the broadcast is rendered pointless if you know that there is no-one able to listen...

Seems to me that the best use of Twitter is search.

Possibly more cynically - but amusing nonetheless - is my colleague Simon's view that: "Twitter is SMS for people who don't have any friends".

This seems to be supported by the FriendFeed Imaginary Friend feature...

Answer: not much really unless you're at a conference of some kind, in which case there's a lot in common. Faceless rooms, too much coffee, loss of all sensation of time...

Having spent a few days at NAB in Vegas, and then a few at AIC in Windsor, you start to go a little stir crazy.

Anyway, back to the regular grind.

Some bits and pieces from blogs which might help you with Silverlight and WPF:

• From Karsten: Using a UserControl as a DataTemplate in Silverlight
• Also from Karsten: A couple of interesting links thinking about Video in WPF: direct pixel updates in Media Element and capturing webcam in WPF
• From Peter: Dynamically loading content into a Silverlight application
• From Adam: A great three part series on creating an XBox Gamercard badge, which demonstrates the thinking behind constructing a Silverlight application as much as it does the technology itself.

I meant to post on this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot...

This report on ProgrammableWeb describes the purchase of Twhirl by Seesmic. Nothing strange in an acquisition, but in this case it's interesting that in Twhirl's case we have a lone developer creating something that is effectively just a wrapper over several existing APIs. (No criticism of the application by the way!). So, there's value in the UX etc. but essentially nothing that couldn't be reproduced by another designer/developer. Or at least - there's no special sauce here, how it is done is easily understood.

So why the acquisition?

Loic Le Meur of Seesmic lists 20 reasons why they acquired Twhirl. I agree with most of the reasons listed, but I suspect that the most important is the second on the list:

Thwirl is the #1 and coolest Twitter client with more than 100,000 downloads and 7% of all tweets posted per day

And there we have it: leveraging an existing user base of an already successful service through a very popular tool should drive that user base to Seesmic.

My only concern is that I'm not sure there's enough data to understand the transience of an audience of a given tool. Maybe Twhirl will lose out to some existing or new tool. That could happen really fast too.

On the other hand, there's a significant opportunity for developers to take advantage of this economy (just like Facebook apps!). Similarly, making access to APIs super-simple is key to technology choice for developing these applications:

• LINQ capabilities which make accessing XML-based services a breeze, which leaves more time to get that all-important UX differentiation in place.
• Data-binding capabilities such as those in Silverlight and WPF make the representation and transformation of data to the UI that much faster too.
•  Take a look at this Digg mashup as an example.

Finally, whilst each app is great I really don't want a raft of these applications on my desktop - it'd be great to see something exploiting the .NET 3.5 AddIn capabilities to plug in the various services I use (Digg, Twitter, Delicious etc.) and become the preferred 'container' for a bunch clients...

I think Angus Logan has the best compilation of information and reaction I've seen so far.