14 DAY TRIAL // The latest update introduced to a tool Microsoft is providing to end users and developers to build content for the Deep Zoom capabilities of Silverlight 3 is labeled Release Candidate. On July 9th, 2009, the Redmond company made available for download a fresh release of the Deep Zoom Composer. At the start of this week, the software giant indicated that the bits, which hold no information related to the stage of the development process in the page on the Microsoft Download Center where they are served, had reached the Release Candidate stage. The previous version of the Deep Zoom Composer, delivered in June 2009, was labeled a Preview release.
“Last week, to coincide with the release of Expression Blend + SketchFlow RC and Silverlight 3, we updated Deep Zoom Composer as well,” revealed a member of the Expression Blend and Design team. “As always, please uninstall all existing versions of Deep Zoom Composer before installing the new version. This release contains improvements to a handful of the existing features based on feedback many of you have provided us.”
After it started offering Silverlight 3, which was officially released to web on July 10th, 2009, Microsoft also delivered the tools necessary to build content for the latest iteration of its alternative to Adobe Flash. In this regard, developers are now free to download the Release Candidate of Expression Blend + SketchFlow, an innovative new feature that allows for project sketches to easily be put together. The latest variant of the Deep Zoom Composer comes with new features including the ability to add links to images, to create menus and to build slideshows.
“Bringing back the Blend / Visual Studio projects for certain templates was one of the changes we made. We also made interacting with the Deep Zoom player smoother by removing the constraints that often led to some odd/jagged zooming and panning. The final change of note has to do with our Exporting where we made it extensible as well as possible for you to create composition-less collection exporting,” the Expression Blend and Design team representative added.
Deep Zoom Composer July 2009 Release Candidate is available for download here.
Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC is available for download here.
Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40624.0) is available for download here.