14.2. Silverlight in the Real World
An impressive example of a Silverlight application is Descry: A Website Named Desire, which was created for the Mix conference. This web site illustrates the web site development process (see Figure 14-1) and is available online at www.visitmix.com/labs/descry/awebsitenameddesire/.
Figure 14.1. Descry example project from Mix team w(www.visitmix.com/labs/descry/awebsitenameddesire/)
One of the earliest but still very impressive uses of Silverlight is on the Hard Rock's memorabilia page. If you haven't seen it, go to it now at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/. The page shows rock memorabilia items owned by the Hard Rock (see Figure 14-2). The user can fluidly zoom in and out to display more detail of any individual item. This site was created with Silverlight and a technology called Deep Zoom.
NOTE
Deep Zoom is freely available for your use if you want to create a similar application: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645050(VS.95).aspx.
Although a relatively new technology, Silverlight has already been put to the test when it was used very successfully to stream coverage of the Beijing Olympics for NBC. Brian Goldfarb (group product manager) said Silverlight streamed more than 250TB of data over this period (www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Microsoft-Proving-Ground-Silverlight-at-the-Olympics/).
Interested? You should be. Take a look at the technology stack Silverlight is built on.
Figure 14.2. Hard Rock memorabilia page (http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/)
