Deep Zoom Composer Updated: Seadragon Ajax Support, New API, and more!

Today, we released another update to Deep Zoom Composer, and you can download it from the following location:


dzcicon Download Deep Zoom Composer

NOTE: Be sure to uninstall any earlier versions of Deep Zoom Composer before attempting to install our new version.

Most of the work in this release has been under the hood to fix bugs and usability issues, but we did add a few features that you may find cool to use!

Seadragon Ajax Support
One of the biggest changes we made was to revamp our Export UI and provide you with the option of exporting your composition as a Seadragon Ajax project:

 image

If you haven’t heard about Seadragon Ajax before, it is a JavaScript-based implementation of the Deep Zoom functionality found in Silverlight. You can read more about Seadragon Ajax and the difference between this and Deep Zoom at Lutz Gerhard’s blog.

New and Improved API
Something that we’ve mentioned in the past is that we want to make it easier for all of you to integrate Deep Zoom tiling functionality into your own applications. In the past, you only had access to the command-line tools SparseImageTool.exe and ImageTool.exe.

In this release, we are moving away from the command-line tools and moving to a .NET/managed DLL that you can more easily integrate into your applications. I will be sharing more details on this DLL in a future posting, but all of Deep Zoom Composer now uses this DLL for its internal treatment of tiled images. One nice benefit of this is that you get better reliability and performance when importing and exporting images!

Updated Project Templates
In the past, we really haven’t given our project templates much attention. We are changing that with this release with more useable templates for both Silverlight and Seadragon Ajax:

slTemplate

The revised templates contain bug fixes and usability issues that many of you have given us feedback on.

Numerous Bug Fixes
We deviated a bit from what we said last time that future releases will focus more on under-the-hood changes. The changes you see today are things that many of you had asked us about, so even though we are continuing to invest in stability and performance, do feel free to send us more suggestions. Some oft-asked features may find their way into a future version.

Thanks To..
As always, each Deep Zoom Composer release is a collaborative effort from individual from across Microsoft. A large part of this release relied on the efforts of Dan Cory, Melinda Minch, Lutz Gerhard, Avi Dunn , and other colleagues in Live Labs!

Cheers!
Celso Gomes, Christian Schormann, Janete Perez, Kirupa Chinnathambi