Deep Zoom Composer – February 2009 Preview Released

  • Article

Hi everyone,
We have just released another update to Deep Zoom Composer, and you can download it from the following location:

dzcicon Download Deep Zoom Composer

The application itself contains only fixes to issues that you have reported (slightly better memory utilization, a fix for PNG transparency), but the DeepZoomTools.dll library has gone through some significant improvements. In a nutshell, if you had images that did not work properly in the earlier version of Deep Zoom Composer, you should find that most of those images should work now.

I will blog about the improvements to the Deep Zoom Tools shortly.

Thanks,
Kirupa & Janete

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2009
    Look forward to playing with it, any chance the DLL runs in Medium trust? guess I will find out :)

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2009
    Great, exactly what i wanted, as a few images were a little tricky to use with it.

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2009
    DZC的更新，主要是改善性能和修正问题。其最大的更新是在于DeepZoomTools.dll库的大量改进。如果以前DZC不能处理你的一些场景，现在可以再试试。 Download Deep Zoom Composer

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2009
    Ha sido lanzado un nuevo release del Deep Zoom Composer , el cual pueden descargar aquí . Más información

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2009
    Today (as announced by Tim Sneath ) the Silverlight team released an update for the plug in which is

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2009
    Saiu ontem uma atualização do Deep Zoom Composer com pequenas melhorias e ajustes:  The application

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2009
    Onur - Seajax export should work in the February 2009 release. Since you are seeing the 2008 date, there is a good chance your downloaded version is older than what is actually posted. Try uninstalling DZC and installing the February 2009 release again. I'm curious to know if everything works, for the latest release contains a lot of fixes (especially with image tiling) that you may want to have :) Cheers! KIrupa

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2009
    In this issue: Ed Silverton, Tim Sneath, Shawn Wildermuth, Koen Zwikstra, Tim Heuer, Ken Cox, Robby Ingebretsen

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2009
    Deep Zoom Composer – February 2009 Preview Released

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    I can't seem to use the mouse wheel to zoom after clicking the full screen button.  This is not knew to this release. Thanks. Mike

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    Michael - that is actually a Silverlight "feature" that has existed since the release of DZC that contained the full screen code a few releases ago. When you are in full screen mode, your keyboard and mouse functionality is reduced for security reasons. You only have mouse button, arrow keys, and space bar support. You do not have the ability to use other keys on your keyboard or the mouse wheel. Cheers! Kirupa :)

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    Wondering if you have any information about an outofmemory exception that happens in silverlight when trying to view large  collections (5000+ images)...the images show up, but then quickly disapear... Any suggestions on how to debug this?

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2009
    This version has some pretty serious memory issues compared to the previous SparseImageTool.exe version. Things that it used to do in a few 100 megs of core memory now require over 6 gigs of memory (and a x64 bit machine). I've put details on the DeepZoomComposer forum. Anything that can get this fixed would be much appreciated - this is a show stopper for me. :(

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2009
    Hi Gordon! Thanks for letting us know the about the MSI upgrade issue. Regarding the memory consumption, I have replied to your forum post. That should not be happening, and I'm investigating further on why the behavior is worse using DZTools instead of the old SparseImageTool executable. :)

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2009
    Hi Gordon! Thanks for letting us know the about the MSI upgrade issue. Regarding the memory consumption, I have replied to your forum post. That should not be happening, and I'm investigating further on why the behavior is worse using DZTools instead of the old SparseImageTool executable. :)

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2009
    We have a strange problem with both version of the DZC (dec and feb) releases: We add 16 pictures taken by a normal digital camera and align them in a vertical row. The pics ar 5 megapixel each. Now if we import the composition as Seadragon AJAX, the first 11 pictures show up, but the rest is not there. I checked the generates images JPGs and it seems the pictures didn't get processed at all. Now, if I export the same project as silverlight, all images appear. Has anyone hade the same issues?

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2009
    We are using DeepZoomTools.dll and silverlight to view large diagrams.  The zoom and pan features are really nice.  I'm feeding in the diagram as one image (4MB) and an output folder. Public Shared Sub GenerateDeepZoom(ByVal imagePath As String, ByVal outputFolder As String) Dim imageCreator As New Microsoft.DeepZoomTools.ImageCreator() imageCreator.TileFormat = Microsoft.DeepZoomTools.ImageFormat.Png imageCreator.TileSize = 1024 imageCreator.Create(imagePath, outputFolder) End Sub The image generation speed seems slow.  I can watch the different zoom levels being populated.  Even after the first image is written to the zoom level folder each image after that takes several seconds.  I have no idea how you are splicing the image, but once you have resized the image for a zoom level, shouldn't it be able to tile it quickly? Also, this should be easily parallelized right?  At the very least, each zoom level is totally  independent.  My Quad core machine has one processor maxed with the others wanting to help!  Any plans on this, or am I missing a setting? Thanks for a great tool! Mike

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2009
    Man – I can’t believe I missed this!  Well, yes I can – I haven’t had a chance to read blog posts

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2009
    digg_url = "http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig/archive/2009/03/04/deep-zoom-composer-february-2009-preview

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2009
    This Deep Zoom is something else. The screencasts on Channel 9 and the webcast on http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/silverlight.aspx are way cool.

  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2009
    A equipa Microsoft Expression acabou de lançar uma nova versão do Deep Zoom Composer. Podem obtê-la aqui

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2009
    HELP I note that clicking on "User Guide" under the help menu sends me to your blog post of March 5th LAST year.  Also, F1 doesn't appear to work at all - how do I get to the User Guide!!

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2009
    Oops! Ignore my last comment - I've now found the User Guide :-) Problem was that I'd managed to install two different releases side-by-side and was running the wrong one.

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2009
    Prendendo spunto da un post sul blog del mio collega Arturo Toledo - Product Manager per UX Platform

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2009
    Any luck with getting the DLL to work under Medium Trust?  I get a security exception...  Tips would be appreciated!

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2009
    Hi, i posted my entry about 6 weeks ago, and i don't see it here.  Here it is again, because i still have the same problems, sorry: I wonder if it'd be possible to make DZC more stable.  I'm one of the early users, i built mt first projects Aug 2008.  The tool is great, but here are the issues that i noticed with the latest release:

  1.  No backward compatibility (that's OK, the product is not release yet, I understand, sigh...)
  2. I can't add new albums to my page at PhotoZoom anymore.   2.1. I login to PhotoZoom (by the way, it forces me to re-login every time I open a new project), enter all the required information for a New Album, but the "Publish" button stays greyed out. 2.2. OK, i found my way around this bug (click on the "Existing albums" tab, click on any project, watch the "Publish" button enabling, go back to "New albums" tab, it stays enabled).  Now I can publish!  But no, although the project does get created in PhotoZoom during export, the export process is never successful, giving me either “…Please remove some images from your composition…” (even for the album of 1 image!) or "The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request", or something else.  It looks like the error messages are randomly selected. 
  3.  If I go to the “Custom” tab and create a project locally, I can see it right away in the browser, but I can’t call it back after I closed it.  In the previous version I had .html file with my collection that I could open with IE.  It’s not created anymore with this version.   So, in fact, currently, what I can do is create an album and watch it right away.  I can’t post it on the net, and even if I want to show it to anyone I need to open DZC, open my project and re-export it locally.  This is not very useful at the moment… Again, I love the tool and would like to use it.  If I can. PS. (I run Vista)
  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2009
    Hi Eugene - apologies for the delay in getting back to you.
  1. Yeah, backwards compatbility is something we try to do, but it isn't something we've fully gotten correct. If your project is small enough, I would be happy to take a look at it. Feel free to email me a link to your zip of your project files to kirupac[at]microsoft.com.
  2.  PhotoZoom is no longer supported. It has been replaced by DeepZoomPix, and the latest version of DZC uploads to it instead: http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/04/16/deep-zoom-composer-updated-to-support-publishing-to-deepzoompix.aspx
  3. The HTML file should be created. If you browse to the appropriate folder under Exported Data, the HTML file should be alongside your generated images. The browser simply loads the same HTML file that has been written to on disk. You should not have to re-export your collection again just to be able to re-view or upload your content. Cheers! Kirupa :)

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    Hi, With the new version, I'm facing problems while exporting the DZC proj as Silverlight DZ proj.. as there is no .sln file and respective folders created anymore...can you please guide me why this be happening. previous version always showed me an option to view project folder after exporting.. but here that option does not appear. please respond...

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    Thanks for the Comments Suru83. This option will probably be returned in the next release as a button next to the Export button. In the meantime, what you can do is use the SilverLight Export option, and on the dialog that shows up at the completion of the export, you will have a button to open the Preview. From there the behavior will be the same as before. Yariv

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    Hi, thanks for the prompt reply.. so here i see that I will not be able to obtain the silverlight project file for me to edit in VS?.. is there any way that can be done?.. because I'm totally depending on editing these project files(page.xaml.cs and others) for my work! or using the previous version would be the only option for me right now?

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    I had one more query and would be great if you could help me. I'm currently using a single large image to DeepZoom, once the generatedimages folder is created with DZC, initially it had been broken down into 13 folders giving me a deeper zoom for the image but ... with my next try with a slightly modified same large image, i had the folders created till 12 only which wasn't as deep as the previous one. any concepts or clues to achieve a deeper zoom into the large image? can I control it in some way?

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    suru - just to help us understand, why do you need the VS project file each time you export? Currently, we are planning on keeping the current behavior and providing the source files to the VS project on our blog with some instructions on how to make them work inside your own VS solution. Thanks, Kirupa :)

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    ok, i figured the degree of zoom is dependent on image size.. :) my post can b deleted.. thanks.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    I need it in the VS because I plan to add some code to make some interactions using the zoom i.e. things like ZoomAboutLogicalPoint(), Viewports and related stuff to modify few animations..

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2009
    Also, it would be helpful if i have clues from you.. since i have my inputs from http://blogs.msdn.com/webnext/archive/2008/03/13/deepzoom-in-c-not-just-possible-but-easy.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage I'm still figuring out how would i extract the exact logical points in the image..

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2009
    Hi, can you atleast please tell me in this new version of DZC..after exporting to a silverlight deepzoom project, if i make a change in metadata.xml.. how can i see preview of the page now? .. ive been trying to open the test.html directly from the folder .. but it does not load...

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2009
    Hi suru83 - you have to actually upload to a web server or test in an environment that emulates a web server such as Visual Studio. In our upcoming release, we will try to bring back the ability to have actual Visual Studio projects. This will greatly simplify this process. A good place to learn more about the workings of MultiScaleImage is Lutz Gerhard's blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/lutzg/ Cheers! Kirupa

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2009
    Hi, with this new version of DZC I wished to add a tag to my image with transparant background that i superimposed on the larger image, I added the tag on the DZC compose window, but it does not appear on browser. I'm guessing a code is required to activate this feature (source : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd943052.aspx ) can you let me know how the tag can b achieved here....

  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2009
    I'm using deepzoomtools.dll for generating the tiles. Local it works fine, but when I want to deploy this application, I'll receive an 'security' error. Does someone knows how to solve this problem?

  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2009
    Marcel - what trust level is your application runnning in when on the server?

  • Anonymous
    September 03, 2009
    Hello Kirupa, My provider told me to run it under medium trust. Is it possible to use deepzoomtools.dll under medium trust?

  • Anonymous
    September 03, 2009
    Unfortunately, this will not work in Medium trust, but I will look into any alternatives if possible.

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2009
    hi, please can you help me know if i can get my DZC project published online somewhere, since i need to use my old version of DZC project, since i did a lot of work on the tiles manually.. is it still possible for me to upload this whole thing online and view it? please tell me steps required to get it published..will i need a webserver or smthing? thanks,