Silverlight PivotViewer Now Available (Channel 9)

Silverlight PivotViewer Now Available

Posted: Jun 29, 2010 at 3:26 AM

By: Larry Larsen

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10 minutes, 13 seconds

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In this video, Brian Goldfarb and Brett Brewer stop by to discuss the new Silverlight PivotViewer control release. In addition to discussing its immediate availability, they talk about tech transfers between labs and product groups like Silverlight. For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, PivotViewer is a new visualization technology delivered as a Silverlight control. It helps visualize large collections of items in a more useful and organized way. Below are links to resources which will help you get started with the PivotViewer today:

· Silverlight PivotViewer Download and Technical Documentation: here

· Collection Building Tools by Live Labs: here

· PivotViewer Community Forum: here

· First customer implementation: Hitched, a leading UK wedding planning site

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section31 Expert in CoffeeDrivenDevelopment

Jun 29, 2010 at 10:33 AM quote reply

I was really looking forward for this release. Nice job!

Just wondering what is the maximum size for a collection where the control becomes unusable?
GreyCloud

Jun 29, 2010 at 11:08 AM quote reply

Looks great

can you do the same for a scatter/bubble plot (x,y,radius) and not only a bar chart?

re-scattering points on a chart would look cool - especially if you could auto-add a trendline!
shaggygi

Jun 29, 2010 at 6:50 PM quote reply

Great! I've been waiting on this control for weeks. Thanks for the update.

I have not had time to play around with the new SL Pivot control and not sure if announced during this release, but I wanted to know if there are any new tools on how to create collections ( both data and images )?

The Excel tool is nice, but seems there are better ways to do this programmatically for nightly collection builds and publishing to server. Also, some of the Pivot guys from videos and Mix session mentioned there was a Photo Shop tool ( tab delimited file ) to create the images. I hope they are going to release a better tool to integrate within Expression suite and/or DeepZoom Composer. I don't have Adobe tools and don't plan on it, so all my collection images are blank until then:(

Thanks again. Can't wait to use control and read Jesse's tutorials.
gaelhatchue

Jun 29, 2010 at 7:05 PM quote reply

Any plans for a WPF pivot viewer?
shaggygi

Jun 29, 2010 at 8:22 PM quote reply

@gaelhatchue: I read they are planning, but have to add the Multi-Scale ( Deep Zoom ) technology first. Probably not until a .NET 4 Service Pack or .NET 5.
jamiet

Jun 30, 2010 at 1:18 AM quote reply

At the end Brett remarks that the SQL Server team have announced that Pivotview will be in the next version of "Analytics (sic) Services".

Can someone point me to this announcement please?

Thanks
Jamie
Dan

Jun 30, 2010 at 9:36 AM quote reply

Goldfarb in the house! Good stuff
CKurt while( ( !succeed=try() ) ) { }

Jun 30, 2010 at 3:59 PM quote reply

What kind of structure do you recommend for the following data collection (Simple , Linked or Dynamic )

A photo archive of a bi-anual event.

# Every event has a given number Joepie 2002 - Joepie 2004 - Joepie 2006 - ...)
# Every event consists of 4 days of sepperate content (day1 - day2 - day3 - day4)
# Every event consists of 16 different 'stages' (all booked fully for 4 days)

This would give me the possibility to look who stood at one perticular podium over the many years, over many days. Or other endless combination. We have about 1500 pictures a day (spread over 16 stages). This seems like an ideal setup!

Also, every 2 years we would add stuff to the collection from the newest event.
LarryLarsen A new world man putting the new world in order.

Jul 01, 2010 at 4:36 PM quote reply

I'll try to get someone from the team in to answer some of your questions.
JennDox JennDox, Live Labs representative, specializing in the Pivot contol

Jul 01, 2010 at 8:56 PM quote reply

Hello everyone! I am still tracking down the location of the SQL announcement, but I have some other thoughts to share. Great questions, you all really seem to grok what Silverlight PivotViewer is all about.

Q: How many items before it is unusable?

A: We recommend keeping a slice of a collection to just 3000 items. You may choose to have a dynamic server backing the collection that determines how to slice it to get the optimal list. An example of this is the wikipedia collection. Or you may want to have a series of linked collections that link together based on a common atrribute, like actors in a movie. That would be like our AMG movies collection. But if you want to optimize performance of items in the control at one time, three thousand is a good number.

Q: Can I use a different layout to view items?

A: No, we do not yet support those layouts, but they sound like great ideas!

Q: Are there better tools?

A: The Live Labs team released two new tools with this launch. One is an open source version of our command line tool, so that you can use the code in your custom workflow. The other is a Just in Time dynamic collection builder that serves data on the fly. They can both be found at our developers' page: http://getpivot.com/developer-info/tools.aspx

Q: Plans for a WPF Pivot viewer?

A: We do not have any short term plans for a WPF control, but there has been enough demand to make the team think hard about what it would take.

Q: How could I structure photo albums from a biannual event?

A: All three strucutres have different advantages and disadvantages. Since the PivotViewer is hosted in a webpage, you could provide links to specific collections that just contain all photos from one event (simple). Or, you could have a hierarchy where one collection shows one event as one item, and then when you open that item the viewer would launch the collection of all photos from the event (linked). Finally, if you think that someone would want to query across different events but that there would be far too many photos to contain them all in one collection, you could have a search box at the top of the page to do a JIT query against the data, dynamically build the items that match the query, and that may allow your customers to look at the data from different angles (obviously dynamic). It might be good to try the simple first and see what experiences you feel are good and which are missing.
JennDox JennDox, Live Labs representative, specializing in the Pivot contol

Jul 02, 2010 at 1:38 PM quote reply

This partnership was announced at the TechEd 2010 keynote which you can watch here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/Keynote01.

Around 1 hr 15 mins in they show Pivot and announce it as a future part of Analysis Services. Thanks!

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