Silverlight Slide.Show | The Coffeehouse

mswanson

I suspect this is just the kind of thing that Niners will appreciate. Vertigo recently released their free Slide.Show application for Silverlight 1.0. I have a sample and some pointers in today's blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2007/12/18/silverlight-slide-show.aspx. Not sure how embeddable (or not) it is in The Coffeehouse, but it certainly works well for blog entries and web sites.

jamie

cool

*my fav part was you use iframe to embed.
i love iframes!

(que w3bbo on why iframes are bad Wink

)

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

Here's a thought for you crazy chaps at Microsoft. Given that you have an Office2007 -> managed plugin, how about you make a site that you upload a PPT to, and it gives you back a slideshow/presentation for viewing online? That would be pretty neat.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

mswanson wrote:
Not sure how embeddable (or not) it is in The Coffeehouse, but it certainly works well for blog entries and web sites.

You can (understandably) not use iframes in C9 posts.

I'm not so sure it's a good idea for blog posts either, because no self-respecting RSS reader accepts iframes, so you require people to visit your site to see the slide show.

esoteric
λ

Looks great. The most interesting project from Vertigo is still Family.Show, though. And, perhaps the Quake 2 port.

mswanson

Sven Groot wrote:
I'm not so sure it's a good idea for blog posts either, because no self-respecting RSS reader accepts iframes, so you require people to visit your site to see the slide show.

I generally agree with you, Sven. In this case, though, the choice comes down to including the slideshow or not. And since my post was about Slide.Show, this was the only way to pull it off. I'd love to know a better answer if someone here has one. I considered using in-page script, but as far as I know, blogs.msdn.com doesn't support that.

jeffsand
Inch by Inch

mswanson wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: I'm not so sure it's a good idea for blog posts either, because no self-respecting RSS reader accepts iframes, so you require people to visit your site to see the slide show.

I generally agree with you, Sven. In this case, though, the choice comes down to including the slideshow or not. And since my post was about Slide.Show, this was the only way to pull it off. I'd love to know a better answer if someone here has one. I considered using in-page script, but as far as I know, blogs.msdn.com doesn't support that.

Actually Mike blogs.msdn.com now supports IFRAME's. With that you'll be able to embed any of the Silverlight media content on our sites and Slide.Show in your post or templates.

There is the probably in get rendered in aggregators though so you'll need to link back to your post. Sad

mswanson

jeffsand wrote:
Actually Mike blogs.msdn.com now supports IFRAME's.

Yes, I know that; that's how my Slide.Show is currently embedded in the referenced post. Sven was simply mentioning that he didn't think IFRAMEs were a good idea for blog posts in general, and I was asking if there was another option.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Actually there isn't really a good alternative, since RSS readers would ignore script as well. It's a pity, but there's not really a good way to embed rich media in a blog post that will be published via RSS.

billyzkid

I am the project lead for Slide.Show at Vertigo. Our primary architectural concern was how to make the Slide.Show control as flexible as possible when embedding it, configuring it, and providing it with data (i.e. images and captions). We even went so far as to borrow .NET's concept of the provider model to allow users and especially our CodePlex contributors to quickly develop whatever configuration/data providers they could dream up (e.g. Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, Astoria, etc.)

Out of the box, Slide.Show supports either XML or JSON configuration/data. I believe JSON to be essential for inline configuration and to avoid the cross-domain restrictions inherent with downloading XML files on the fly. Our goal was to build a control that could be embedded by a "friend" in a comment on your MySpace or Facebook page, like you can with many Flash controls.

With Silverlight 1.0, all of this depends on the target page allowing either SCRIPT or IFRAME tags to be injected, which is fine by most personal sites, but currently unacceptable by most major community sites like MySpace. We couldn't think of any other viable alternatives -- am I missing any? Currently, although it's still an OBJECT/EMBED tag at its core, a Silverlight 1.0 control seems pretty useless without at least one SCRIPT tag.

That is why we are excited to hopefully see Slide.Show get upgraded to Silverlight 2.0 one day. That's when we believe things will finally be on par with Flash and our embeddability story should be very interesting!