Videos of my TechEd 2012 sessions now available on Channel 9

The videos of my two presentations from TechEd Australia 2012 are now available online.

Windows Phone SDK – Be Productive Straight out of the Blocks

and

Windows 8 with a View

You can grab the code for these talks here

DigiGirlz, Deep Zoom and Azure

A few weeks ago I was tasked with coming up with something for the attendees at the first ever DigiGirlz event in Australia to play with. Something to get them a little excited about technology. Catherine Eibner came to me with some ideas that she thought would make for a compelling exercise and we came up with a cool Azure based Deep Zoom app!

We decided to take the Eventr (Codeplex | Blog | Blog) open source project I worked on last year for ReMIX Australia 09 and make it more accessible and dynamic (and brand it a little for the event).

What came out the other side was a dynamic Azure based DeepZoom creation application with auto updating Silverlight front end!

What does it do?

Firstly, check out the running application here!.

The Silverlight application shows a DeepZoom composition of all the photos that were taken at the DigiGirlz event.

The photos were all added to a Flickr Group which the Eventr application automatically scans. When new photos are added, the photos are downloaded in to Azure and processed in to a new DeepZoom composition.

The Silverlight client is notified that new images are available – it then highlights the new images and automatically reloads the DeepZoom composition from the server.

The system is configurable to scan a Flickr Group, perform a Flickr full text search or perform a Flickr tag search (or a combination of these).

The system has been designed to be “multi-tenanted” which means it can host more than one group of images… I.e. it could do DigiGirlz and another collection – all the images would be separated depending on the URL entered.

How does it work?

The application is hosted in Windows Azure and utilises a lot of what Azure has to offer.

• It uses a WebRole to host the Silverlight application and services (which read from the DataBase).
• All data is stored in a SQL Azure database. The data stored includes information about which images have been downloaded from Flickr, their metadata (title, description etc.) and their processed state (have they been included in the DeepZoom composition yet?).
• Linq to SQL is used to access the SQL Azure database. You can access SQL Azure in the exact same way that you would access a normal SQL database. In fact when in development mode (local) I used SQL Express, and during deployment I changed my config to point to a SQL Azure instance… too easy.
• WCF RIA Services was used to communicate from Silverlight to the server (where Linq to SQL is used to then go up to SQL Azure). The Silverlight client is very easily then able to get the metadata (title, description) from the database, as well as send data back (like view counts etc). All in all, it was a very simple task to get data from SQL Azure into Silverlight.
• Azure Blob Storage is used to store the generated DeepZoom files. Blob storage is great because you can access the files directly using a URL, as well as get programmatic access to them to CRUD(create read update and delete) them.
• To fire commands based on events from the user, the system uses Azure Queue Storage. Queues allow you to add an item in one place, and read it in another (only one thing can read an item)… so it’s great to fire a command once, and pick it up once to execute it. An example command in this system is “Clear”. Admins can clear out all the images/collections and data and start again.
• To build the Deep Zoom collection, the system utilises an Azure Worker Role. The worker role polls the database every few seconds to get out the Flickr search configuration (i.e. which group or text search to scan). It then performs this search against Flickr. New images are downloaded and added to the SQL Azure database for later processing.
• When the Azure Worker Role downloads an image, it is stored in a Windows Azure Drive. Once stored, it is processed using DeepZoomTools (a part of Deep Zoom Composer.

  Windows Azure Drive is important as DeepZoomComposer doesn’t work with streams (which is how Azure Blobs work)… it needs a drive letter. Azure Drive is great as it provides drive letter access to a special type of blob storage – meaning it will work in Azure!

  Once the composition has been built it is uploaded to Azure Blob storage for access from Silverlight (you cannot access Azure Drive files from outside the Windows Azure hosting platform – they are a special type of storage).

Can I test it out??

Unfortunately at this stage I cannot release the code for this stuff, but – you can have a go at using this project yourself…

Head over to the test Flickr group here. Add a photo the the group (KEEP IT CLEAN PLEASE!!).

Then head over to the test URL and keep watching… your new images will show up in no time (under 2 mins)!



Resources

Azure Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/
Azure Storage Intro: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cc994380.aspx
SQL Azure Overview: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sqlazure/
Windows Azure Overview: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/windowsazure/
WCF RIA Services Overview: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/riaservices/
Get Started with Silverlight: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/
Eventr DigiGirlz Demo: http://jak.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx?guid=764fbcd0-c15f-45f3-bda5-de3ed9081ce8

Eventr Codeplex project: http://eventr.clodeplex.com