Question - UWP Pivot Viewer/Control

[Pinox]

Does anyone know if there is any source examples that I can find that replicates the old "Silverlight Pivot Control" in UWP. Always thought this was a nifty control especially in displaying data.

Example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3mH-aDhebk

Thanks.

[Odonno]

From what I know, it's available for UWP. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/controls-and-patterns/tabs-pivot

[skendrot]

The Pivot is already part of the framework controls

[Pinox]

Thanks guys for the hint. I am aware of of the pivot control in UWP but that is not the same as the silverlight control. Silverlight control does all the animation etc out of the box, You give it the data set with label identifiers and you can use the data as in the animation clip on youtube. The control also does the zooming drilling down into the details of the data automatically with feature like deep zoom , item view , graph view etc.

Updated comment => 26 Jan 2021 : It was corfirmed by a Microsoft Live Labs team member that this control was not a Silverlight control but a WPF (xaml based) control.

[skendrot]

Ahhhhh... Sorry. That control was pretty cool

[deltakosh]

Was a really great control. Not sure if there is a big need for it though

[Pinox]

I know Microsoft thought is was pretty cool at the time. To me this is the Excel pivot table equivalent right in your app. Really a must for displaying large amount of data in an intuitive way.

This was the official microsoft youtube link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZuFUZpEZ-A

Perhaps I'm just a bit long in the tooth but I like it ;)

[deltakosh]

I'm completely fine iIf someone wants to try adding

[deltakosh]

Hey @Pinox !
In order to evaluate if a feature can be added to the toolkit we created a new category on WPDEV Uservoice: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform?query=Pivot%20Viewer%2FControl

Can you please create an entry for your idea? based on upvote we will be able to know if this is something we can add to the toolkit!
Thank you very much

[Pinox]

I opened a uservoice ticket , for anyone liking the feature

https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform/suggestions/18058147-pivot-viewer-control-silverlight-equivalent

[hawkerm]

This is kind of related: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform/suggestions/18662884-multiple-levels-of-semantic-zoom

[Kyaa-dost]

@Pinox what's the update on this?

[Pinox]

@Kyaa-dost - no update on this. I'm hoping someone in the Blazor community can do something like this as the original control was a silverlight version although my personal opinion is that these controls should exist in WinUI 3.0

[michael-hawker]

@Pinox they never open sourced the Siliverlight version of the control, eh? That'd be the only path I would see forward to get this in the toolkit... otherwise, I'm thinking we may just want to close this issue unless we could find out who still owns that code somewhere in Microsoft... ☹

@stmoy are you aware of this older Silverlight control (I think shipped out of MSR?) and how we might track down current ownership (if any)?

[mdtauk]

If the code can be found and ported to WinUI - rather than calling it a Pivot Viewer (which would be confusing with the modern Pivot control - could it perhaps be called something like a SortingView?

[Pinox]

Hi @michael-hawker , searching youtube i found the following link by a Microsoft presenter. I'm sure she would be able to track down this for you. Super exited about u looking for the source.

The use case for this control is endless, especially in big data, AI , ML and visualization in general. Sorely missed control in the MS stable.

This is a company that used the initial concept of Microsoft PivotViewer (Silverlight) and ran with it into a totally seperate product.
https://zegami.com/

https://zegami.com/collections/public-5b9fb08a87596d0001b17ff5?pan=TYPES_PANEL&fc=labels&view=grid

Microsoft Presentation link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Aey3xm0CBg

@mdtauk - a name that compliments the concept of a 2D data visualizer will be great.

[michael-hawker]

Thanks for the links @Pinox.

Jenn is no longer around, so that's a dead-end to start with unfortunately, but I've found some other folks I may be able to get some history from as a starting point.

[Pinox]

@michael-hawker , Not sure if this is going to help but names that come up under LiveLabs that were members of the the incubation team at Microsoft. Gary Flake , Mark Bramley , Karim Farouki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jUrqvwKV74

It looks like the zooming capability was based on Seadragon technology , a company that MS bought and then they MS created an open source version of it called https://openseadragon.github.io/ The open source version was a javascript version

Source : https://github.com/openseadragon/openseadragon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seadragon_Software

[stmoy]

@stmoy are you aware of this older Silverlight control (I think shipped out of MSR?) and how we might track down current ownership (if any)?

Silverlight was before my time, I'm afraid 😅 - CC: @ranjeshj, the WinUI controls lead to help us track down current ownership.

[Kyaa-dost]

@stmoy are you aware of this older Silverlight control (I think shipped out of MSR?) and how we might track down current ownership (if any)?

Silverlight was before my time, I'm afraid 😅 - CC: @ranjeshj, the WinUI controls lead to help us track down current ownership.

@ranjeshj do you know? ⬆️

[Kyaa-dost]

Still waiting for @ranjeshj to provide any update.

[Pinox]

@michael-hawker @Sergio0694 @stmoy @Kyaa-dost This thread has been stuck on the feedback from ranheshj for almost a year. So I decided todo more research regarding the original Live Labs team at Microsoft.

I managed to get in contact with Mark Bramley that worked on the live labs team. He confirmed that the PivotViewer was a WPF (XAML based) app and not a Silverlight based app as originally thought. Mark also wrote a server app that could generate Pivot collections from arbitrary sources of data, and included example plug-ins to create collections from the SQL Northwind database, Twitter API, and others. That was released by Microsoft under a shared-source license , he unfortunate no longer has the source code for that but it was released to the public at a developers conference.

Searching the web I found some snippets that indicate the use case of the PivotViewer control.

The original app can be downloaded from the link below , unfortunately the collection sets are no longer maintained by Microsoft on the getpivot.com website but you can check out the app by installing the link below.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52294

The deep zoom functionality that is used is also documented here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/silverlight/dotnet-windows-silverlight/cc645050(v=vs.95)?redirectedfrom=MSDN#loading-a-deep-zoom-image

As we are looking for a person that is still employed at Microsoft I found another team member and he was the general manager of the Live Labs team as per LinkedIn profile. Brett made a few presentations on the Pivot Viewer so he will definitely be able to get the source code for the control or advise on current ownership.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-brewer-967182/

@michael-hawker @stmoy @Kyaa-dost if you guys can give Brett a call it would be much appreciated.

In general the pivotviewer was pitched as a new method to view "web" content, but the underling tech is really cool and I believe can be of great use within WinUI 3.0 / Community Toolkit. I see the tech as the Microsoft Excel "Pivot Table" equivalent for native apps.
With the increased focus of ML ,AI and data visualizations within the technology stack this control will be a great addition to the .NET ecosystem especially taking into account that the source code already exist and that Microsoft already wrote off their original investment in the tech. If I have ever seen a low hanging fruit this is it ;))

[ranjeshj]

Sorry to drop the ball on this. This was way before my time. I'm trying to find out but it was a long time ago, so I'm not sure if I'd succeed in tracking down an owner. I can imaging building something like this using ItemsRepeater and some custom layouts that know how to virtualize based on the zoom factor.

[Pinox]

Just a reminder of the tech in action at very low frame rates. The seadragon technology that Microsoft open sourced was a big part of the total binary size.

[Kyaa-dost]

Will be moving this to the discussion as that will our new platform for all the older discussions that still requires clarity and further input.