.NET Rocker

With the release of Silverlight 5 just around the corner, I thought I would start a series on the new PivotViewer and how to get up and running with it.  We will start the series off by exploring how to create a client side collection.

One of the most anticipated features of the new PivotViewer is the ability to create client-side collections.  PivotViewer accomplishes this by utilizing the traditional ItemsSource property for data and a form of XAML data templates to define the trading card.  It is interesting to note that the fundamental core of PivotViewer is still using the DeepZoom technology.  If you are thinking that DeepZoom only handles images and not XAML, you would be correct.  Under the hood, PivotViewer is rendering the data templates to images and then adding those images to DeepZoom.  Remembering that little tidbit will help later down the road.

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Continuing with the series on PivotViewer, the next new feature to look at is the concept of semantic zoom.  “So what is semantic zoom” you ask?  Semantic zoom is showing different visual information at different zoom levels.  In the case of PivotViewer, the trading card image will change based on how large the trading card is on the screen.

I have had several people ask me why you would want to change the trading card as the size changed.  If you think of the normal PivotViewer interaction, you begin with seeing a lot of items on the screen at a relatively small size.  The amount of information that you can provide at that level is very small.  In fact, typically you are only able to provide one or possibly two pieces of information effectively (where most of the time it is just one).  Once you start filtering the data, the number of visible cards gets smaller and, as a result, the size of each card gets larger.  This gives you the opportunity to effectively display more information to the user.  Once the user selects a trading card then majority of the PivotViewer screen real estate is filled with the selected item.  This gives you the best chance of displaying detail information to the user.  As you can begin to see, as the user gets closer to the individual trading card, you can effectively show them more information.  This is semantic zoom.

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One of the features that prevented many projects from using the original PivotViewer was the static nature of the collection.  Once a collection was loaded it was not possible to modify any of the trading cards within that collection.  This limited the potential workflows that PivotViewer could be used to implement.  The Silverlight 5 PivotViewer changes all of that.  PivotViewer now responds to changes within the collection as well as changes to the individual objects themselves.  The best thing about this new feature is that we don’t have to make any changes to the PivotViewer to take advantage of this.

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After a break to review some of my favorite Silverlight 5 features in the 12 Days of Silverlight series, it’s time to get back to some PivotViewer action.  This is the 4th post in the PivotViewer Basics series focused on some of the basics of the Silverlight 5 PivotViewer.  In this post we will look at item adorners, what they are and how to use them.

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Well we are coming to the end of the PivotViewer Basics series.  To round it out, I thought I would continue on with the last post which discussed Basic Item Adorners.  In that post we looked at implementing the custom actions that you found in the first PivotViewer.  This post will look at taking it one step further and look at what it takes to build our own item adorners. 

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