Project Silverlight: Deep Zoom

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Deep Zoom - Known issues

I spent a few days on the silverlight forums to see if there were any known issues with the current Deep Zoom beta release. The below list of my findings is mainly to help me keep track of the issues so that I don't spend a good amount of my time trying to fix what cannot be fixed (or can it?)!

Source property change is not handled well! There seems to be a workaround for non collection images but in general it seems to be broken - http://silverlight.net/forums/p/11709/44231.aspx#44231
Cross domain not working! Hosting the application and the deep zoom images in different domains does not work - http://silverlight.net/forums/p/13152/43883.aspx#43883
MultiScaleImage loses the image resolution after ScaleTransform! I noticed this when getting in/out of full screen mode as well - http://silverlight.net/forums/p/13014/42316.aspx#42316
MultiScaleImage only supports absolute paths! See my previous post for an example of how Vertigo worked around this (same domain only) - http://silverlight.net/forums/p/12182/40164.aspx#40164
Transparent images are not supported in collection mode? http://forums.expression.microsoft.com/en-US/thread/7f5aace6-9ab1-4503-8b34-f0378b731e98

For those of you who might be thinking of playing around with the bin file format you might want to wait a little while. The final release version of Silverlight 2 Deep Zoom is expected to support the xml file format instead of the bin file format - http://silverlight.net/forums/p/12784/41724.aspx#41724

6 comments:

Jay Borseth said...: Great list. Here are a few more which may have causes other than MultiScaleImage, but are related:

1. The mousewheel code published by Vertigo doesn't seem to work in FullScreen mode. Scroll the mouse wheel and nothing happens.

2. FullScreen mode can't be activated in Firefox.

3. When zooming in or out, the control seems to sometimes jump ahead and then back (in terms of zoom) instead of progressing smoothly in one direction. I don't know if this is due to the scroll wheel processing or something internal to MultiScaleImage.

- Jay; April 7, 2008 at 10:45 PM
Wilfred Pinto said...: Jay,

Full screen mode is working for me in Firefox. Did you try the fullscreen button in my example?; April 7, 2008 at 11:12 PM
Jay Borseth said...: Regarding FullScreen: I just tried your sample (assuming you mean "Dissecting Hard Rock Memorabilia and Silverlight Deep Zoom - Part 7" with Firefox 2.0.0.6 and pressing the "FullScreen" button has no effect. So is it a Firefox version issue?; April 8, 2008 at 8:30 AM
Wilfred Pinto said...: Yep, that's the one! It's working fine on my version of Firefox 2.0.0.13 so it could be a version issue.; April 8, 2008 at 9:23 AM
Jay Borseth said...: A few more issues:

4. 'MeanSquareError' and 'BitsPerPixel' fields are set to zero. This is probably intentional with JPEG images, but worth noting.

5. The 'TilePresence' fields are not used consistently.

I've created a viewer and analyzer for MultiScaleImage levels which you can see at: http://deepzoom.blogspot.com/2008/03/deepzoomanalyze.html.

I've also created a MultiScaleImage with different content at different zoom levels at www.deepzoom.com (click on Puget Sound).

- Jay; April 11, 2008 at 10:17 PM
Jay Borseth said...: Yes, I updated FireFox to 2.0.0.13 and now FullScreen is working on both your and my applications, so it was a FireFox version issue.

- Jay; April 11, 2008 at 10:22 PM