{"id":2812,"date":"2010-06-30T09:56:07","date_gmt":"2010-06-30T08:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/2812-pivotviewer-comes-to-silverlight-data-as-visual-collections.html"},"modified":"2010-06-30T09:56:07","modified_gmt":"2010-06-30T08:56:07","slug":"pivotviewer-comes-to-silverlight-data-as-visual-collections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/2812-pivotviewer-comes-to-silverlight-data-as-visual-collections.html","title":{"rendered":"PivotViewer comes to SilverLight \u2013 data as visual collections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft has released a PivotViewer control for Silverlight<\/a>. Data visualisation is a key business reason to use Silverlight or Flash rather than HTML and JavaScript for an application, so it is a significant release. But what does it do?<\/p>\n

PivotViewer is the latest tool to come out of the Microsoft Live Labs Pivot project<\/a>. Pivot is based on collections, which are sets of data where each item has an associated image. A pivot item has attributes, similar to properties, called facets<\/a>; and facets have facet categories. Facet categories are used to filter and sort the data.<\/p>\n

More complex Pivot data sets have several linked collections, or dynamic collections which are generated at runtime as a query result. This is necessary if the size of the data set is very large or even unbounded. You could create a web search, for example, that returned a pivot collection.<\/p>\n

Once you have created and hosted your Pivot collections, most of the work of displaying them is done by the Pivot client. There is a desktop Pivot client, which is Windows-only; but the Silverlight PivotViewer is more useful since it allows a Pivot collection to be viewed in a web page. The client (or control) does most of the work of displaying, filtering and sorting your data, including a user-friendly filter panel.<\/p>\n

PivotViewer also makes use of Deep Zoom, also known as Seadragon<\/a>, which lets you view vast images over the internet while downloading only what is needed for the small section or thumbnail preview you are viewing.<\/p>\n

The result is that a developer like Azure Technical Strategist Steve Marx was able to create a PivotViewer for Netflix<\/a> with only about around 500 lines of code<\/a>. This kind of product selection is a natural fit for Pivot. <\/p>\n

I was quickly able to find the highest-rated music movies in the Netflix Instant Watch collection.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

Starting with the full set, I checked Music and Musicals and then set Rating to 4 or over.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

It seems to me that the strength of Pivot is not so much that it offers previously unavailable ways to visualise data, but more that it transforms a complex programming task into something that any developer can accomplish. Microsoft at its best; though of course it will only work on platforms where Silverlight runs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Microsoft has released a PivotViewer control for Silverlight. Data visualisation is a key business reason to use Silverlight or Flash rather than HTML and JavaScript for an application, so it is a significant release. But what does it do? PivotViewer is the latest tool to come out of the Microsoft Live Labs Pivot project. Pivot … Continue reading PivotViewer comes to SilverLight \u2013 data as visual collections<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,55,67,77,80],"tags":[231,586,727,825],"class_list":["post-2812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-intelligence","category-microsoft","category-professional","category-silverlight","category-software-development","tag-business-intelligence","tag-microsoft","tag-pivotviewer","tag-silverlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}