Hosting DeepZoom on Silverlight Streaming

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)