You can uninstall VM Additions version 13.813 and later from Hyper-V!

Okay, I admit, maybe its just me amusing myself.

I always remembered (from the old days of Hyper-V…) that we are not able to uninstall VM Additions installed by Virtual PC when the VM is running in Hyper-V... I had to hack Windows 2008 to boot into non-hyper-v, to run Virtual PC, so that I can uninstall the damn VM additions!

Today, after installing Win2k8 R2, I imported some old VPC’s VM into Hyper-V, and go to Add/Remove programs to try my luck... And it works this time round!!

Some digging into TechNet found out that we actually can uninstall certain version of VM Additions directly in Hyper-V. Not sure when this was out, but it sure is news to me! (and a time save too!)

Improvement in Importing VM in Hyper-V on Windows 2008 R2

Had recently ran out of space in my dev laptop’s old 250GB hard disk. Just moved-in to the new Windows 2008 R2 with Seagate 7200.4 320gb hard disk, and, of course first thing to do is to fill it all up again with with tons of Hyper-V VM. To my amazement, I get some cool new options in the Import VM screen:

Now this is some real improvement! Especially the ‘Duplicate’ check box!!! Can’t count how many times I accidentally imported my archived Hyper-V VM in the old Hyper-V and found out that it cannot be imported anymore!! Now at least the options are clear and able to ‘duplicate’ sure helps! Was a shamed that these are not able in the ‘old’ Hyper-V, everyone, just update to R2 already!

The Dreaded Seadragon to the Rescue!

Had some interesting development on current project where customer requested to be able to allow user to view huge JPEGS from their portal. Deep Zoom in Silverlight comes into the picture, and was discussed extensively in the project.

Two key problems though:

1. Deep Zoom Composer provides a simple and easy way to create deep zoom image collections, but provides no simple way to automate it when user uploads large images into image library in SharePoint.
2. We are kind of afraid that Silverlight, as the viewer, might  not be as easily available in controlled corporate environment at this moment

Spent the weekend with Deep Zoom, and found out that there were APIs available to create deep zoom collections using .NET codes, Bryant had a great blog post on this:
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL

Had to do more test for applying it into ASP.NET (SharePoint), but, fundamentally, it should be workable. This should solve part 1 of the problem.

For part 2, the handy Deep Zoom composer provides the answers straight away. It showcases a way to generate Seadragon Ajax viewer to view a single Deep Zoom Image.

Some study on the generated html files found out that it is extremely simple to generate seadragon into web page:

Basically just by creating Seadragon.Viewer on a container DOM element and calls openDzi passing in the xml files generated by ImageCreator.

One thing to note, Seadragon, as the time I tested, only supports one single image (no ImageColelction generated xml support). But, well, it works for me ;) Also tested it on Chrome, Safari and Firefox, all works :D

 
Testing Seadragon in a SlimBox2

Zoom babe, zooooom!

Time to convince customer to go for Seadragon, and call it a day, cheers!