FotoVision: New End-to-End .NET Smart Client Sample Application

FotoVision has released to the web (thanks to Ed Kaim for drawing this to my attention). This is a fantastic new smart client application suite developed by Vertigo Software (some of the brightest developers I know, who were also responsible for the original release of IBuySpy, Quake II on .NET and many other Microsoft samples).

The application firstly allows you to organise and manipulate your photo collection using a Windows Forms application; it makes full use of the System.Drawing namespace and graphics support in the Base Class Libraries to allow photos to be resized, retinted and cropped - but it also extends these classes to provide advanced capabilities such as JPEG EXIF tag manipulation. The main feature is a web application that acts as a photo gallery along with a web service that allows the Windows Forms application to upload and synchronise photos with the gallery. This demonstrates many useful core concepts for web applications including secure secret storage and anti-spam devices. Lastly there's a Pocket PC application that provides an alternative way to manipulate the web service.

Not only is the application one of the sweetest looking that I've seen, the full source code is available for download, inspection and modification, along with three white papers (one for each application) - and of course it's all free.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who shares their family photos on the web. I've used the Rebex Image Gallery control until now, since it's a nice little ASP.NET control that pre-caches thumbnail images, but it's not perfect for my needs. I'll certainly be playing around with FotoVision and hope to have it up and running in the next couple of weeks for my own site. A great application - the Vertigo team have done it again!