Tonight, Microsoft and others kindly sponsored a Silverlight 2 Release Party at North Portland’s North Agency.

North has a beautiful building. If you’ve never been there before, it’s located at 1515 NW 19th Ave in one of the newest and strangest areas of Portland. North is an advertising agency who, according to one of their spokeswoman, “connects brands with people using film, design and music”. North has been occupying their current location for a little over a year.

The first presenter was Tim Heuer, a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Silverlight. The rest of the program was open, which allowed everyone to walk around to different demo stations featuring Silverlight locals Erik Mork, Kelly White, and Jason Mauer.

Deep Zoom

DeepZoom provides the ability to zoom almost arbitrarily large images in Silverlight in a really nice manner. Jason Mauer presented Deep Zoom for a series of images randing from maps to standard JPEG photos. The scaling mechanism of DeepZoom was very impressive.

DeepZoom allows mutiple images to be displayed at very small and very large scale without affecting performance of the application displaying the image. The only property affecting performance is the number of pixels to be displayed on screen.

Demo

Hard Rock Cafe has a website that uses Deep Zoom, but you have to have Microsoft Silverlight installed in order to use it. I highly suggest checking it out, though — especially if you like super-close-up images of guitar frets.

BizSpark

BizSpark is kind of like Microsoft’s version of Y!Combinator. It is a new program for supporting startups and entrepreneurs. To be eligible for BizSpark, all of the following your Startup must be:

• In the business of software development,
• Privately held,
• Have been in business for less than 3 years, and
• Have less than US $1 million in annual revenue.

To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions Startups must also be developing a new “software as a service” solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet.

Raffle

There was a raffle at the end for a bunch of books. Jason Mauer made a random number generator in Silverlight in order to choose raffle winners. I found that pretty cool. I picked up a book on Professional LINQ, which I am going to have a lot of fun with. I was also talking to Adron Hall about Yahoo! Pipes and doing a side-to-side comparison of Silverlight’s capabilities vs. the capabilities of Pipes.

PDXUX

The PDXUX group will be meeting the third Tuesday of every month, beginning in January. Visit the PDXUX website for details.

Thanks to North, Microsoft, and PDXUX et al., for a successful and curious event.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Journalist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.