PTBT Consulting - Web Image Slideshows

Web Image Slideshows

Few years ago, I was asked to put up the company's equipment brochure on the web. The brochure was created by Adobe Illustrator and the file was about 400 MB. I did some search and found my way to get the job done. First, I converted Adobe Illustrator pages into images, then I used Lightbox (a JavaScript tool) and a little help from ASP.NET controls to make slideshows.

Japanese Scenes

Lightbox JavaScript can be downloaded here. I used ASP.NET Repeater Control to display images on the page and SQL to hold image data on the server end. Hover the mouse over the image until you see "NEXT" or "PREV" labels, then click on the image to navigate to the next or previous image.

Dutch Scenes

There are issues with Japanese Scenes project. First, the slideshow needs to be able to play through all images in the collection automatically. Second, using SQL to hold image data seems a little too much of work anytime I need to add or remove image from the collection. Instead of using SQL, I am using XML and LINQ to store and retrieve image data for the slideshow.

American Scenes

Finally, we need to make our slideshow more interesting. I create a JavaScript code which plays music in the background while the slideshow is running. The script will loop through a list of .MID files.

So far so good! Kids are very excited about my slideshows since they start seeing their birthday pictures flying around in webpage. The background music is great. However, a large file of music will cause a very long delay to load the file completely before playing that music file. To avoid this, we need audio streaming for the slideshows. I think it's time to discover what Silverlight can do.