Just found out from the Expression Blend and Design blog that the Nibbles Tutorial website, famous for providing small tidbit tutorials on Expression Studio, Silverlight 3 and WPF, has been updated to show how the cool samples included with Expression Blend 3 are deconstructed. Check out the updated site now!
Scratching you head and unsure how to get yourself started with WPF? Not to worry, WPF Reactor is power packed with loads of resources to make you from zero-to-hero!
Except from the WPF Reactor download site:
WPF Reactor is a demo application that contains all the technical resources to get you started with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) right away. It has a feature called ToTster that allows you to save any information on a web page all from within the browser. You can build up and aggregate your own WPF content as you go. This demo is an exploration of Microsoft’s latest Windows client platform technology; WPF, Internet Explorer 8 and Live Services. WPF Reactor is a gateway to more WPF whitepapers, hands-on-labs (HOLs), samples and reference applications. The contents component is called WPF-in-a-Box.
Which I believe easily one of the most impressive and innovative enhancement to Expression Blend!
Why do I say so? Read on.
One of the key element that makes Expression Blend such a powerful tool, is its capability to allow designers to customize and have complete control over the visual look and feel of every element in WPF and Silverlight applications, which would turn out exactly the same as it looks in Blend, thanks to XAML.
So, when customizing the look, feel, transition animations, etc of a control, the steps are pretty different for both WPF and Silverlight, briefly shown below:
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Thus, in order to “style” each control, the designer would have to define the transition animations that are stored in a Storyboard, and the look and feel of various states, and for Silverlight applications, they also need to write code to trigger the transition animations.
With the introduction of the Visual State Manager (VSM), that will be included in the June preview of Expression Blend, these steps could be further simplified, but not replaced. As VSM is introduced to simplify the customization of visual states of controls.
Visual States are essentially the various states of a control that could be seen visually. For example, a checkbox could have a few visual states:
| Unchecked | –> |  |
| Checked | –> |  |
| MouseOver | –> |  |
| MouseLeftButtonDown (or MouseDown) |
–> |  |
With VSM, you could easily customize the various visual state of a control, along with the animations that will be in effect upon each state transition, and the very duration of each transition animation.
The Interaction Panel of Expression Blend will now include a State Explorer, allowing designers to now dive down, view, and customize the various visual states of any control. The duration of transitions can be defined for each visual state group, or for a specific visual state, or even for transitions to other visual states.
VSM is not only supported for template-based controls, but also User Controls, where states could be defined, instead of customized based on the available states.
Do take note that the VSM will be available for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Application Projects for the June preview of Expression Blend, but the preview version for WPF will be available as a separate download.
To find out more about the VSM, check out the awesome posts by Christian Schormann of the Expression Team:
- Creating Control Skins with Visual State Manager – An Introduction (Make sure you see the video!)
- Visual State Manager: Goals
- Visual State Manager for User Controls: A Simple Chord Finder Example
The introduction of VSM greatly simplifies the process of “styling” both WPF and Silverlight applications, by providing a consistent solution of managing “styles” of controls.
I for one love the idea of not needing to write any code in order to “style” the applications I craft, and most definitely reduce the learning curve of designers going from WPF to Silverlight and vice versa.
Kudos to the Expression Team in bringing such a huge improvement to Expression Blend!
Have a bug with WPF applications? Especially for applications that previously ran okay? Did the exception come from using .EndInit()?
Well I did, and I had a bug with my WPF application, which resulted in it throwing a XamlParseException. At first, I tried skimming through my XAML code, but eventually gave up because it was pretty lengthy.
Thus I did a search on what could cause a bug to come out of no where, when I stumbled around and finally found the solution.
It was all because I have installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.
According to Jeremiah Morril, internally WPF uses some of the same APIs as IE, thus some of the APIs might have been overwritten due to the IE 8 Beta 1 installtion, resulting in the thrown exception, which would occur when the .EndInit() function is called upon, used mostly when you are writing code to display BitmapImage elements in your application.
Once I uninstalled IE 8, everything ran fine.
(To remove IE8, go to Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features -> View Installed Update, where it is placed under the Microsoft Windows grouping, then Uninstall it.)
Hope this helps anyone who faces the same issue.
Just got news from my MSP manager that Remix Essentials 08 will be held at:
Date : 27th May 2008 Time : 9.00am – 1.00pm Venue : Lim Kok Wing University, Cyberjaya
I’ve been hearing “rumours” that Remix 08 will be held at soon, and I was really looking forward to it.
There will be sessions on stuff like Expression Studio, Windows Live, Silverlight, WPF, and UX. The speakers of these sessions are awesome guys like Leon Brown, Arturo Toledo, Angus Logan, and our resident Silverlight guy, Rohan Thomas.
Unlike the Remix or Mix events of other countries, Remix Essentials 08 is totally free!
On top of that, attendees stand a chance to win a full copy of Expression Studio 2! The seats are limited to a first come first served basis, you’ll definitely not want to miss out, so register right now!
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.
Tim Anderson has just posted an awesome interview with Scott Guthrie, where they talked about many cool geek stuff like LINQ, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WPF.
I finally understand why they’re going crazy about LINQ, that allows the use dynamic SQL to perform CRUD operations on other databases like MySQL and SQLite, that’s the next best thing to seeing the functionality of stored procedures in free databases!
Tim was great in pointing out certain issues that many have always wondered about Microsoft’s vision of Silverlight, and based on what Scott says, it could be fair to say that Microsoft is definitely sticking by their word in enabling the delivery of Silverlight across different platforms and browsers.
There was also comparison of Silverlight between different technologies like WPF, Google Gears, Adobe AIR, and of course, Flash and Flex, where some very very good points were pointed out, like whether or not XBAPs are still viable now that Silverlight is out in the streets.
Especially loved this part:
“I’ve seen comments from Mac users that have used the Silverlight 1.0 release, say for the Halo 3 streaming video, to the effect that “I didn’t think video on the web worked this well, and I’m pretty shocked that when I right-clicked on the control it says Microsoft.”
This is the link to the Halo 3 trailer powered by Silverlight, (the original version is still Flash though) I’ve never seen Silverlight work on Macs, could anyone justify that statement?
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! 
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 ).
Read the rest of this entry »
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!
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