Devigner

Nope that isn’t a spelling error, neither is it a word that is in the dictionary, yet.

So now…just what is a Devigner? It’s basically used to describe someone that does not only a Developer but also a Designer, hybrids that have knowledge of both spectrums. He’s basically somewhere in between of the devigner-o-meter! (Picture courtesy of Daqing Lee)

Some are basically capable of coding stuff from scratch, whether its C#, VB,  Actionscript, Javascript or any other programming language, they write poems with code and some of them even speak in binaries! From planning the overall user experience of projects, coming up with brilliant designs in Illustrator and Photoshop to slicing and dicing them up into HTML and CSS, thats how devigners tick. They don’t rely much on WYSIWYG interfaces, they’re not challenging enough, devigners rock with manually typing out those line of HTML code and relish having full control of everything from the front-end to the back-end (doubt this happens much in the real world).

Role of Devigners

Developers and designers never speak the same language, as both work on very distinct roles in the creation of applications, the developers deal with the back-end coding and all the awesome business logic and stuff, while the designer does all the front end graphics, animations and the overall user experience of applications. Sometimes, both sides may not have much respect for each other.

The developer might get troubled because the designer doesn’t know how much work it would be to make a textbox with rounded corners that is backward compatible. The designer might not be happy when the developer tells him that due to timing contraints, some of his/her designs (rounded corners?) can’t be implemented as it would take too much time.

It’s in this scenario, where it is recommended to have a devigner, someone that have knowledge in both areas but not to the extent of specializing in both areas, to bridge between two parties. It gets better if the devigner is involved in the planning stages they can provide their insights on dealing with how to bridge the best of both the design and development spectrum.

Devigner? Who?

Now you might question, where do we look for these devigners?

The answer is you, you can be a devigner too. Start spending some time on understanding the other side of the spectrum. If you’re a developer, start learning stuff like on interface design and usability. If you’re a designer, start learning more about programming. Just by knowing a little more, you’ll start to appreciate your brother/sister on the side of the spectrum, and making yourself a step closer into becoming a devigner.

Imagine this, a designer suddenly helps out a developer in coding certain modules, or the developer helping out in touching up certain design elements that are missed out by the designer, both parties will respect each other more, which is plain cool.

The great thing is, you would also know if a developer or designer is telling you that something can’t be done, but have actually lied

Devigner : Developer + Designer

Mark my words, Devigners will soon be a new term in the industry.

Cheers!

Virtual Earth Map Control for VS 208

Imagine, just drag-n-drop from your toolbox onto a Web form, set a few properties, without requiring a single line of JavaScript, and you have yourself Virtual Earth on your ASP.NET Web application, with full support of stuff like zooming, panning, AJAX and everything to fulfill…your “mapping” needs.

 

Introducing the Virtual Earth Map Control for Visual Studio 2008, which was unveiled at Remix Australia by Angus Logan in his Windows Live session.

For more information, check out LiveSide.net’s report on it, and the Virtual Earth site. Definitely looking forward to the release!

Xceed Upload for Silverlight

Today, I received the online newsletter from the Xceed team, who are pretty well known for their awesome Xceed DataGrid for WPF, where they announced the release of the Xceed Upload for Silverlight.

It is a full featured Upload control (like the ASP.NET FileUpload Control), built on Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, which has cool features like a loading indicator, imagine previewing, multiple file uploading support, and many more.

As far as I know, I don’t think other control vendors have any file upload control, which is very useful in developing enterprise solutions. This is definitely richer and much more interactive alternate to the ASP.NET FileUpload control, as long as your company can afford it

New version of WPF Released

Today, Microsoft has released a beta preview for of SP1 for various editions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 3.5. And Tim Sneath has also blogged about the availability of the new major version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), that will ship with the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1, which full version will be available later this summer.

The downloads for these Service Pack beta releases are available here. For more information also check out Scott Guthrie’s blog post here.

There are a few major improvements, and the most notable one is the introduction of the Client Profile, which is a scaled down version of the .NET Framework 3.5, that is around 25 MB, where assemblies that aren’t used are removed. Its pretty amazing that the solution to the deployment issue for enterprise WPF applications is pretty similar to the approach adopted by the Silverlight runtime. Ease of deployment will definitely help in increasing the adoption rate of WPF in the industry.

There is also improvement to the WPF graphics engine, with enhanced support for shaders and deeper DirectX support, enabling a Direct3D surface to be brushed on top of any surface of WPF elements. Another notable improvement is the “fixes” on the BitmapEffects we most commonly use, Drop Shadow and Blur, which are now hardware-accelerated, and was previously a definite “no-no” in developing WPF applications as it takes up too much processing power.

Other than that, there are many other improvements like the loading screen of XBAPs now running in HTML instead which is definitely a great improvement, the introduction of Splash screen support in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

There will also be new controls to add on to the arsenal of controls available in WPF, which are the DataGrid, Office Ribbon, and most notably, the WebBrowser control, which could potentially enable seamless integration of WPF and Silverlight applications.

Its great to see that many improvements on WPF, and if Silverlight is to continue evolving to provide the capabilities of what WPF has today, I must say, the future looks very promising indeed.

Developer-Designer Workflow

Check out Ryan Stewart’s post on the importance of developer and designer workflow when it comes to building RIAs and almost any other applications.

He brought up many great points, like how Apple’s focus on both presentation and functionality have contributed to its success throughout these years, and how we’re going to need both the designer’s creativity and the developers code, to come out with something successful.

Collaboration between both designer and developer is essential, and there is a need for a framework or technology to deal with this tricky, tricky issue. The first technology that came to mind, that currently has the best method of dealing with this issue of collaboration, is no other than – WPF.

The workflow of developing both WPF applications and Silverlight applications are pretty similar, where the developer will be using Visual Studio to pump code into the application, and the designer using Expression Blend to craft the user interface.

Where both parties would be dealing with the same project, the same format (XAML), that could be opened in both Visual Studio and Expression Blend, development and design could be done rapidly, and integration would be seamless, and the completed project would include both the creativity of the designer for better user experience and the functional capabilities provided by the developer.

Still, the workflow’s concept might seem a little too elusive, and if you would like to find out more, check out this video from Channel 9, Real World WPF : Designers and Developers working together?!

In the video, Martin Grayson and Paul Tallett from the UK MCS User Experience team talks about their experience working on real world WPF applications and how designers and developers worked together, they’ve also explained in detail the various workflows they have tried out, weighing their ups and downs and their opinion on which is the best workflow for developing WPF applications.

Well, ain’t WPF just cool!

Tech.Ed SEA 2007

This coming September, Microsoft will be having its premier & largest annual conference in the South East Asia region, Tech.Ed SEA 2007, at 10-13 September at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center.

Why should you attend?

Those attending would be able to learn about the new Microsoft products and technologies, not from just any instructor, but experts and specialists in the industry, some of them even from Redmond, and even some which helped built the products and technologies. Which means you can fire questions at them without thinking twice, neat! (On second thought, do think twice)

Not only will you be able to learn, you would also get to know more people in the industry, share your knowledge, get to know more on what’s happening in the ever-changing world of technology.

Who should go?

The conference is mainly targeted at IT professionals and developers, not only to get them exposed and aware of the new products and technologies available, but to better equip them with the priceless knowledge on how, when, and what technologies or products should be used as their business solution, better improving both themselves, and their organizations.

But this time around, developers that like design, or designers that have technical knowledge, should also take part in this conference! Why? Continue on to find out more!

Remix’07 Australia Videos

Didn’t have enough from Mix’07? Craving for more videos to get your mind up and spinning?

Look no further! You could check out the videos from Remix’07 Australia from the PostMix Australia blog!

So far only the videos of day one have been uploaded, and the cool thing is that you could actually see the presenter, unlike the Mix’07 videos that were first uploaded (They’ve replaced some, if not all, of the videos to have both presenter and presentation content, guess I have to re-download……)

One of the videos to note would be Lee Brimlow’s (Design Technologist of Frog Design, author of theWPFblog) session “Rapid Fire Design and Prototyping in WPF”, where he shares his experience in developing WPF applications, including the upcoming Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista! Awesome! He also posted some of the sources he presented in the presentation in one of his post, here.

Conclusion? Download them all

Silverlight 1.0 RC1 & loads of tools!

Sweet, Silverlight 1.0 RC1 has been released, as mentioned from Tim Sneath’s post in his blog. He also mentioned in his post that Silverlight 1.0 RC1, which code-behind is done using Javascript, is now much more feature complete and stable (2000+ bugs fixed!), where Silverlight 1.1 is released as an Alpha Refresh, so download them now and install them!

For those who are interested in developing on Silverlight, Tim Sneath also included links for some of the tools, which are:

---

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

The newest Visual Studio, VS 2008, codenamed “Orcas”, comes with load of features, like multi-targeting support (backward compatibility), WPF & Silverlight editor, Javascript Intellisense, better CSS support, LINQ enabled, and many others.

For more information, refer to Scott Guthrie’s post on VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 Released. For information on its support on ASP.NET AJAX, refer to his post on ASP.NET AJAX in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008.

There are also many other cool stuff about VS2008 you could check out Scott Guthries post here to find out more, I didn’t post them because I really didn’t want to spoil the fun, but hey, its seriously cool, so make sure you check it out.

Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight

Its an add-on to Visual Studio 2008 to support for the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh, make sure you download it along with Visual Studio 2008.

Silverlight 1.0 SDK / Silverlight 1.1 SDK

I’m not sure but the SDK may include steps to help developers upgrade their “broken” Silverlight applications (due to them not supporting the RC1 Release), judging from what I got to know from this post.

ASP.NET Futures CTP

Includes controls that could be bundled together with the ASP.NET default controls in the futures, like the Media control, built with Silverlight, (I saw it demo’ed in this Mix’07 session - DEV05 – Developing ASP.NET AJAX Controls with Silverlight, check out the sessions here), new ASP.NET AJAX features, for more information go here.

Expression Blend August Preview

Make sure you download the Expression Blend 2 August Preview, though the only key add-in I noticed is its support for Visual Studio 2008 (I’m praying “Edit in Visual Studio” goes through the UAC, though I doubt it), but I think they’ve definitely included much more support for Silverlight.

Expression Media Encoder Template Updater

An update for Expression Media Encoder Preview, make sure you have Expression Media Encoder installed, else you could get it here.

Microsoft Expression Blend 2 August Preview could be downloaded here, for more information, you could also refer to the Blend section in the Microsoft Expression website.

---

Wow, thats a LOT of tools, make sure you download them all and go crazy

AIR and WPF

Well, even with the hype surrounding Silverlight and WPF nowadays, this doesn’t mean it will be edging Adobe out of the graphics and animations market anytime soon, because when it comes down go graphics and animation, Adobe is at the top, they have the best graphics design tools (Photoshop), and have the widest used animation plug-in, Flash, a solid programming model in Flex, and now, AIR which stands for the Adobe Integrated Runtime, to allow web designers and developers that are used to their tools to be able to create desktop applications with the stuff they’re used to, e.g: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, and Flex.

I belive most of you know what WPF is already, but for those of you who don’t know, WPF stands for the Windows Presentation Foundation, and its the graphical platform of .NET 3.0, one of its greatest strengths is that it facilitates the collaboration between developer and designer, allowing seamless integration of coding and design. The GUI is declared using XAML (pronounced as ‘Zammel’), which is a markup language just like XML, and its used to define the whole interface, animaitons, 3D objects, its the presentation layer, which is separated from the code-behind, which could be done using C# or VB.NET

After my “brief” introduction I believe you should have now have a clearer idea on what both technologies are (that is, if you don’t know it already ).

Family.Show 2.0

Just found out from this post at Channel 10 that Vertigo have released Family Show 2.0, which is an application that revolves around….dead people! AWESOME!  Check it out here.

Family Show show is developed using WPF, and could be installed via Click-Once, pretty quick download. It shows off many cool features that could be done using WPF. Family.Show not a full product, but mainly a project done by Vertigo to test out the powers of WPF, where they claim to have included almost every trick in the WPF book!

And the greatest of all is, they’ve shared the source code in Code Plex, so for those of you who are interested in learning WPF, download them here now!

Check out how the team at Vertigo developed Family.Show using WPF, and the lessons they learnt from this video at Channel 9.

Vertigo has also created various other WPF and Silverlight stuff, do check them out in their Vertigo Labs page, they’re pretty cool!