My HandsOn with Microsoft Pivot ( + Silverlight Viewer )

First of all i would like to thank Twitter because a tweet on twitter about World Cup Pivot inspired and sparked me try my hands on this awesome tool/application from Microsoft - Pivot.

i would like to remind you all of the great saying "a picture speaks a 1000 words .....". My Pivot collection also contains a number of pictures so rather than discussing about what Pivot is all about, i would like you all to visit the Sample Pivot Collection which i created and uploaded to my web server.

My Hands-On ...

You need to have "Pivot Viewer" installed on your computer to view this. The Pivot Viewer is available at http://www.getpivot.com/download/. There is a Silverlight PivotViewer also that is available for download at http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/. To view the Pivot Collection online you just need to have Silverlight Plug-In installed on your machine.

If you have downloaded the normal Pivot Viewer then you can open the "Microsoft Live Labs Pivot" application installed on your machine. After opening the above application you can put the following url to view my Pivot Collection http://pivotapp.aashishnegi.com/Sample.cxml.

If you have Silverlight installed on your machine, you can visit the Silverlight Version of my Pivot Collection at http://slpivot.aashishnegi.com/Default.html.

Now viewing the above links you must have understood that you can view the Pivot Collection by two ways.

1. Using the Pivot Viewer installed on your machine and getting the url of the .cxml file.
2. Using the Silverlight Pivot Viewer. I think this is a more better way as it allows me to view the Collection directly through the Browser making use of Silverlight's capabilities.

How was your experience with the Pivot ???

How you can create this ?

Now i will focus some light onto "Pivot" and then explain the simplest steps to create your own Pivot Collection and host it online as i did it.

You can get the details about Pivot at its Official Site.

now rather than discussing the details and introduction of Pivot, i will take you through the simplest steps you can follow to build up your own Pivot Collection. There are many ways to create the Pivot Collections.

1. Command-Line ( http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info/cmd-line-tools.aspx )
2. Excel Plug-In ( http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info/excel-tools.aspx )
3. Just-In Time Pivot Collections ( http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info/jit-tools.aspx )

Here i will discuss the method of developing your Pivot Collection using the "Pivot Collection Tool for Microsoft Excel". You can download the Excel Plug-In from the following link http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info/download-excel-tools.aspx. You need to be online while installing the tool. Run the setup in the Downloaded Package.

After you have installed with the Excel Tool, you can see one more additional tab in your Microsoft Excel's Ribbon Bar. There is "Pivot Collections" tab that gets added. you can see the following picture which shows the tab.

You can see i have specified the Pivot Collections tab in the above image. Click on "New Collection" button on the upper left corner. U will get a new excel book window.

Click on "Import Images" button to select multiple images which you want to upload to the Pivot Collection. The images get added to your Collection. Now what just modify the cell values "Name", "Href", "Description" and you can even insert some new "Facets" - the columns which get displayed inside the "Facet Catagories" on lower left side of the "Pivot Viewer". I added "Place", "Pic Taken By" and "Date" as you can see in following image.

Now you can see the "Quick Preview" of your Pivot by clicking the "Quick Preview" button in the ribbon bar. You wouldn't get to see the images in the "Quick Preview" but you will get see all other characteristics such as Facet Catagories, Facets, Sort DropDown, Filter Panel, Info Panel, etc as shown in following image.

If you are ok with the preview, you are ready to hit "Publish Collection". The excel tool publishes the collection and you get following screen.

After its done with the publishing, you will see your collection opened in the "Pivot Viewer" ....

I did some more changes in the collection. What if i want to add multiple values to a single column. You can do it easily. Just separate the values with "double pipe" i.e. " || ". You can see in following image i created the column named "People" containing the multiple values.

I published it and you can see in following image the "Multiple Values" shown in the "Information Window".

What happens after we Publish the collection ?

After you publish the collection and select the location many of the files get created.

1. The .cxml file which is an important file which we point and open up in the Pivot Viewer.
2. A folder with the collection of images and some XML files to handle the images.

If you open the images folder, you will get to see the same architecture and structure as shown by the "Microsoft DeepZoom files" as it works the same way using the "Tile collection" of the images.

The Endnote.

So friends this was my cool experience with "Microsoft Pivot". The "Pivot Collection" i have mentioned in the above example and in the images contained images of size approx "1.5 MB" each. The folder of Images which i added to the collection is about "985 MB". This size of the Images in collection was shrinked to "221 MB". But that was also big n vast in size, so i didn't uploaded this collection to my Web Server.

I created another Pivot Collection to my Web Server which you have viewed through the above links.

I would soon blog about how integrating your Pivot Collection to the Silverlight Application and deploying it to your Local IIS or the WebServer.

Thank You for visiting the Blog.

Please leave your comments to help me improve my blog.

Aashish Singh Negi
aashish.negi@sitgeeks.com

Silverlight 4 Beta - Playing with WebCam, Printing Support

First of all i should thank a bunch of people who helped me in creating this application.

• Vikram Pendse ( Vikram's Blog )
  
• JohnPapa.net to provide blog on to save a picture to disk using .NET Image Tool
  
• .NET Image Tools to provide the .NET Image Tools which i used in the project
  
• Silverlight 4 Beta Documentation available at Silverlight Official Page.
  

You can view the Silverlight 4 application i created at http://testing.aashishnegi.com/Default.html. You should have a WebCam on your machine and the machine should be installed with Silverlight 4 Developer Runtime. It will not work in silverlight3 plug-in nor the plug-in will get updated through the popup it displays. You should manually download and install the SL4 Runtime from Silverlight.net.
Now i will briefly discuss about the project and how you can have a little modifications and try out various new things.
Lets start with a preview of how the screen looks and the controls i placed on the screen.

• WebCam & Mic Support: Lets start and see how we can add the webcam support to the application.

CaptureSource provides us with the methods that work with specific audio or video capture from the associated capture device.

After the CaptureSource is initialized, VideoCaptureDevice can be used to to get the default device configuration. CaptureDeviceConfiguration.GetDefaultVideoCaptureDevice() provides it with the default configures video device. If you right click on Silverlight App and select the Silverlight Plug-in then under the WebCam/Mic tab, we can select and set the default device.

After this the CaptureSource we created above can be used to control the camera. The CaptureSource.Start() and CaptureSource.Stop() will start and stop the cam. As the use of Cam requires user intervention the methods CaptureDeviceConfiguration.AllowedDeviceAccess  and the function CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess() provides user with following dialog box for access request.

In above code the “viewer” is a rectangle that is filled with the brush “VideoBrush” to display the captured input of device.

Clicking Of Pic is something i felt a bit difficult and i referred Vikram’s Blog for understanding this. Following is the code bit for it.

AsyncCaptureImage() can be used to click a snap from the CaptureSource. The Image img is used to add the image to the list box after it is clicked.

• Saving the image as PNG: This section will tell how to save the image we clicked. For this you can refer the following bit of code. .NET Image Tools Library is used in following code lines. .NET Image Tools made it very easy.

• Printing Support: Lets see how we can print something using Silverlight 4 printing support.

Here we can see that PrintDocument class provides printing capabilities for a Silverlight application. As in above code we can see i initialized the PrintDocument and initiated a EventHandler which checks for when the PrintingPage event occurs. Print() can be used to show a Print dialog box.

The PageVisual property is used to choose what elements or rather UIElements we need to print.The PrintableArea defines the area to be printed. HasMorePages represents whether there are more pages to print. Its a bool that returns true if there are more pages to print.

StartPrint can be used if we need to perform some special handling or set up before beginning the printing. The EndPrint event can be used to perform cleanup operations after printing is complete or to detect errors that occured during the printing process. EndPrintEventArgs.Error property will give out the error occured.

• I am currently working with the other new features of Silverlight 4 Beta like Out-of-browser Network Support, Drag and Drop + ClipBoard support, WCF RIA, RightClick support, etc. I will soon blog about these too.

• Thank You all for visiting my blog.

- Aashish Singh Negi
Twitter @aashishnegi
Phone: +919970141082

Exploring Silverlight 4 Beta ........

Hello Friends,

Recently Microsoft announced the next version of Silverlight to be released very soon. Currently in its beta Silverlight 4 has come up with very cool new features.

For writing this article i took the help of the recent Silverligt 4 Beta Documentation available online. You can also download the same and get started.

Those who are new to Silverlight, lets see what this documentation says about it .....

What is Silverlight ?

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA) for the Web. Silverlight unifies the capabilities of the server, the Web, and the desktop, of managed code and dynamic languages, of declarative and traditional programming, and the power of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Silverlight enables you to create a state-of-the-art application that has the following features:

- It is a cross-browser, cross-platform technology. It runs in all popular Web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari, and on Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X. You can design and develop your application without having to worry about which browser or platform your users have.

- It is supported by a very small download that installs in seconds.

- It streams video and audio. It scales video quality to everything from mobile devices to desktop browsers to 720p HDTV video modes.

- It includes compelling graphics that users can manipulate—drag, turn, and zoom—directly in the browser.

- It reads data and updates the display, but it doesn't interrupt the user by refreshing the whole page.

Other Features Of Silverlight ....

- WPF and XAML. XAML. Silverlight includes a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology, which greatly extends the elements in the browser for creating UI. WPF lets you create immersive graphics, animation, media, and other rich client features, extending browser-based UI beyond what is available with HTML alone. Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) provides a declarative markup syntax for creating elements.

- Extensions to JavaScript. Silverlight provides extensions to the universal browser scripting language that provide control over the browser UI, including the ability to work with WPF elements.

- Networking support. Silverlight includes support for HTTP over TCP. You can connect to WCF, SOAP, or ASP.NET AJAX services and receive XML, JSON, or RSS data.

- LINQ. Silverlight includes language-integrated query (LINQ), which enables you to program data access using intuitive native syntax and strongly typed objects in .NET Framework languages.

Whats new in Silverlight 4 (Beta) .....

- New Out-of-Browser Features

- Elevated Trust

- Support for Late Binding

- DRM for Offline Scenarios

- Right to Left Flow Direction

- RichTextArea Control

- WebBrowser and HtmlBrush Controls

- ViewBox Control

- Implicit Styles

- Applying Multiple Transforms is Simplified

- Networking with Multicast

- Printing

- Data Binding Improvements

- Navigation Extensibility

- Collection Sets

- Parsing and Formatting Time Intervals

- Drag-and-Drop and Clipboard Scenarios

- Right-click Mouse Events

- Webcam and Microphone Support

- ADO.NET Data Services

- WCF RIA Services

- Silverlight Designer Improvements

- Dynamic Language Runtime

I will be discussing all of above features in my coming blogs .... so keep pinging me on http://blog.aashishnegi.com/

- Aashish Singh Negi

Mail : aashish.negi@sitgeeks.com

Twitter @aashishnegi

Phone : +919970141082

A package of NEW TECHNOGIES ........

.

I haven't blogged from a long time ........

Now after attending the PUG DevCon on 8-9 th August, I cant wait about writing what i learnt there.

A whole set of new technologies .....

DevCon (Developer Conference) was organised by PUG (Pune User Group) sponsered by Infragistics and INETA. It was an awesome event.

There were variuos sessions on various technologies by Professionals.

Let me open the PACKAGE for U all and tell U what I learnt ......

• AZURE CLOUD COMPUTING
• SILVERLIGHT 3
• RIA Business Application
• ASP .NET MVC
• JQuery

AZURE CLOUD CPMPUTING :

This is a nice technology from Microsoft to support the concept of cloud computing, The sessions were taken by Abhishek Kant (MVP Lead), Vikram RajKondawar and Monish Darda.

All of them cleared the concept about AZURE. All the doubts inmind about AZURE and CLOUD COMPUTING were cleared.

there is a lot of theorotical concept involved but seeing it practically or working on it LIVE is very nice experience.

U all can also visit Azure's WebSite and register for an account so that U can access the features of AZURE PORTAL.

I have also created a HELLO WORLD AZURE APPLICATION. U can visit it at http://aashishsinghnegi.cloudapp.net/

SILVERLIGHT 3 + SKETCHFLOW + RIA :

This is another latest technology from Microsoft. It all started with Silverlight 1.0 (XAML), then Silverlight 2.0 (XAML + C#) and now SILVERLIGHT 3.

Silverlight 3 can be said as a package of new features over the old Silverlight. You can download the latest Silverlight 3 Tools and Expression Studio 3 to make use of new features.

Expression Blend 3 + Sketchflow (Included In Expression Studio 3) comes with a new feature of SketchFlow.

Using Sketflow U can create a rough sketch of your application. U can manage the flow between the XAML pages. The rough SKETCH can be presented to the user and the suggestions of user can be saved and reviewed by the Developer.

Using RIA Services in the Silverlight 3 Application, we can create a business application very fast. It takes only 15minutes to create a database business application with built-in user management support.

Use of Domain Service makes it easy and fast to create a database rich application.

Vic Parmar (from Infragistics) showcased all new set of Silverlight UI tools. It was awesome.

ASP .NET MVC :

We all have been creating ASP .NET Web Applications and Web Sites. But now here we get a new feature MVC ( Model View Control ). Rahul Rajadhyaksha was the great mind to tell us about this. That was a little HiFi session for me but afterwards when i worked on it and created some Projects on it, it was very easy to understand.

I will blog about ASP .NET MVC sometime later when i get better hold of it.

JQuery :

This was also a HiFi session by Dhaval Faria. You can refer JQuery site to know more about it. I cannot blog about it right now as i haven't gone through it till now. What i think is that it will be nice using JQuery in our application to make it faster.


Thats al for now guys. I will be back blogging more on SILVERLIGHT 3.

Vikram Rajkondawar had one nice SILDE with him ...... WORDS OF WISDOM ...


" TECHNOLOGY has the POWER to ALTER REALITY !!! "

Using Silverlight Live Streaming ...........

Hey Friends .... First Of All Happy New Year to All Of You ......

Pray To God That We all have a Hapy,Prosperous And Techno Full Semesters This Year ....

Pray to our Techno Gods That We Meet Up With More New Exciting And Thrilling Technologies ....

Friends In last session i told u all "How To Create Panorama using The DeepZoom Composer" .......

-> Now this session we would be talking of how to Upload our Silverlight Applications (Whether Application of VS2008,Expression Encoder,Blend,DeepZoom Composer etc.) or Videos to our Web Pages or to Our Blog Pages Using Silverlight Live Streaming ..........

-> We would also talk about the Web Version of DeepZoom Composer i.e. Photozoom that helps us to create our Silverlight Enabled Deep Zoom Album online ..... Just Upload The Photos And Get The Online Album ....


1) Uploading Using Silverlight Live Streaming .........

- First of all goto Silverlight Live Streaming Web Page .......... And SignIn Using Your Windows Live ID ....

- Now After Signing In Just Complete The Other Processes Needed To Complete Registration And Click On "Manage Application" Link That Appears On Left Side Of Page ....


- Now After Clicking Manage Application You Will Get The List Of Applications Already Uploaded To The Silverliht Live Streaming as Shown In figure below .....





Click on any of the Application Title uploaded Before To Edit Their Properties .....

Click "Upload An Application" to Upload A new Application To Silverlight.Live.Com

Give The Name For The Application as Shown in figure below ...And Click Create .....




*** Now Follow The Following Instructions Carefully ***

* As u all know the life of the silverlight application we create is present in the XAP File created while creating silverlight appliation.

* To View The original contents of this XAP file just rename the file to "JAR File" Or "ZIP File". For Eg. Just Rename 'Pro.xap' to 'Pro.xap.zip'. Now If U extract this ZIP file, u will get following two files - 'DLL File' And 'XAML File'.

* In case of Silverlight Applications Using Video Files eg. Application created using Microsoft Expression Encoder,etc. u may find the 'Video File' along with the DLL & XAML Files.

-> Now U need to create a file "Manifest.xml" whose contents will be as follows :

DeepZoomProject.xap is the XAP file of Application ....

-> Now Zip the existing XAP file along with this Manifest.XML file. ** In case U are uploading the DeepZoom Application ZIP the "GeneratedImages" folder along with the XAP File And XML File

-> Now Select This Compressed File In The File Select Dialog Box U get After Clicking The "Browse" Button




-> Click "Upload" And Your File Will Get Uploaded To The Server. After The Upload Is Complete U Will Get A Screen As Shown Below ... telling Various Informations And Properties Of Ur Application.

-> Here U will get various options such as Launch Application test Page - To view Ur Uploaded Application Delete Appliation options For Embedding This Application Into Ur Web Pages Or Blogs

-> To Embed the application onto ur web page/blog follow any of the method and U will get a nice Silverlight Application Added To Ur page ..........



2) Creating An Online Album Using Photozoom .... Its Very Simple ... A person having 0 knowledge of programming/deepzoom/silverlight,etc can us the Photozoom to create his online Photozoom Album ......

-> Just head to Photozoom Site ..... SignIn with Ur LiveID .......Click "Get Started" ......

-> Just A Give The Name For The Album ........ And Select the Photos To Be Uploaded ....

* Silverlight RunTime Needs To be Installed as needed By Upload Application

-> After Uploading The Photos ... U get Various options of Viewing the Album, Email the Album, Delete The Album etc.


-> Select View Album To View Ur Photozoom Album .......... U will get an iframe code to embed this photozoom viewer into ur web pages/blogs ...


Thus Friends here We saw beautiful and easy methods for uploading our silverlight applications and creating Online PhotoZoom Album and embedding them to web page/blogs .............




U can see on this page .... I have Uploaded two Silverlight Frames ........


-> My Panorama - As Told in Previous Blogs, I created A Panorama Using DeepZoom Application and Uploaded It Using Silverlight Live Streaming .....


-> My Photozoom Album - I have created an Online PhotoZoom Application And Embedded It To My Blog page


*** Friends pls Share Ur Views About My Posts,Blog Page,My Presentation,etc to help me knowing the mistakes i would be making and let me correct them and make my future posts error free ***


-Aashish Singh Negi
SIT Lonavla
Email: negiaashish2008@hotmail.com
Blog: http://aashishthepro.blogspot.com/
Site: http://sites.google.com/site/aashishthepro