Silverlight Slide.Show

  • Article

Our friends at Vertigo have created a free application for Silverlight 1.0 called Slide.Show. If you have Silverlight installed, you should see a slide show of my photos within the body of this blog post. Most of them are from my collection of wallpaper images, and a few are from a cruise to Italy and Croatia this past summer.

To incorporate the photos in the body of this post, I followed the instructions in the Quick Start Guide and had my slide show up and running within about 10 minutes. I borrowed some of the style settings from the guide and from Vertigo's own sample, and I tweaked them from there. I know there are more settings available ("hundreds of color, font, size, position, and behavior options" according to their feature list), and I can't wait to read the forthcoming user guide for the details.

To embed the Slide.Show application in this blog post, I used the following IFRAME tag:

<iframe marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" src="https://www.mikeswanson.com/Slide.Show/default.htm" frameborder="0" width="480" scrolling="no" height="300">

If you hover near the bottom of the frame, you'll see some thumbnail images and other navigation options. I only configured a single album for this example, but you can configure many. And, since I don't typically name my photos, I didn't include the SlideDescription module. Slide.Show also includes a FlickrDataProvider. As the name implies, it uses the Flickr API to retrieve and display photos for a specified user. Some of the other features include multiple transition types (fades, wipes, slides, etc.), cross-browser support (IE 6 and 7, Firefox 2, Safari 2 and 3, both Windows and Mac), and a full-screen mode.

To get started with your own show, check out the Slide.Show project on CodePlex. And if you're interested in writing some code, I'd love a simple utility that allows me to easily generate the XML data file.

Great job, Vertigo!

Update: Ben Hoffman has blogged about a free tool he's created that will read metadata from your images, resize them, and easily edit the data that gets included in the slideshow. Awesome!