The last few weeks I’ve felt like a little intern again.  With the WPF Bootcamp and the early stages WCF integration into the Speedy Rewards messaging infrastructure (I’ll be posting on this soon), I’ve had lots of time to play with .Net 3.0 stuff. 

For those that have had a chance to fiddle, there are two feasible options at this point: 1) VS.Net Extensions for WCF & WPF and 2) Orcas CTP’s.  The Extensions, in my opinion, were a valiant stop-gap effort to get people started.  This is especially true for WCF, because there isn’t a whole lot of design time experience necessary for web services with the exception of those monstrous config sections.  The WPF extensions were OK, but it was basically like having XAMLPad embedded in VS.  Orcas CTPS, on the other hand, have been virtually useless.  The WPF designer crashed regularly and was slower than waiting for me do math in my head.  This may be due to the Virtual PC requirements, since they hadn’t yet worked out the issue of Visual Studio 2005 and Orcas living happily side-by-side.

Anyway’s, as of today, there is a better #2.  Orcas has hit Beta 2.  Go get it.  There are Express SKU’s too, so don’t worry if you aren’t an MSDN Subscriber, you can join the party too.

Happy coding – go make something cool.

One of the cool tools we had a chance to use while up at the WPF Bootcamp in Redmond was Expression Blend.  While there I became pretty engrossed in the ease with which you could create fairly cool animations without an intimate knowledge of Xaml.  This made it all that harder to leave seeing as we had the latest bits at the time (the Release Candidate is available as a 30 trial).  Fortunately, or gratefully?, Microsoft has decided to make it available on MSDN.  That means me!

I will say though, while reading Charles Petzold’s book Application = Code + Markup which starts with Code and then moves to Xaml, I believe developers and designers alike will be fooled into trying to generate a number of more complex animations with paths, triggers/timelines, etc. rather than implement new animations via code.  Karsten Januszewski, who we were lucky enough to meet last week, pointed this exact scenario out while I was attempting to mimic the North Face kiosk carousel via a path.  He referenced a previous post of his which shows how to create a custom animation.  Until I grasp the animation framework in WPF, I’ll not risk embarrassing myself by attempting to better explain what Karsten already does much better than I.

[Update: These are being posted due to the ftp access restrictions at the Microsoft Campus]

Today has been pretty intense which has kept me away from blogging “live”.  Today started with Kevin Moore, Program Manager for WPF/Blend(?), and a lightning round with Expression Blend.  As I mentioned yesterday, I’m not a designer, so Kevin had my mind spinning before breakfast had even settled. 

For those dev-signers (developers who design out of necessity) Blend is initially a very overwhelming experience.  Don’t expect to create the North Face demo your first time out.  That said, I was able grasp the benefit of a few concepts including DataTemplates and Styles.  This stuff is like OO for UI.  Pretty cool.

  As soon as Kevin had lost me (quickly), I decided to start playing with Blend Styles and Templates.  At the same time, I decided I’d design my own button.  It turns out my reasoning for wanting to do this, super-rounded ends, were already possible in the standard button, but it was a good learning experience.

Styles

Styles are pretty straight forward and many references to CSS have been made.  Styles seem to be a way to share design properties between elements, especially similar elements.  It seems pretty intuitive, but every time you change the visual appearance of a control, even via Visual Studio or XamlPad, you are styling your control/element.  It becomes really powerful as you share these styles across your project by including these styles in your App Resources section.  From within Blend this is pretty easy after you’ve gone through and stylized one of your controls by selecting that element and going to the Object -> Edit Style -> Edit Copy.   

You can then Right Click your other elements, go to Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Apply Resource and Select the Style you just created.  You now have a sharable style across your WPF application.  I’m still curious about the ability of sharing these styles across multiple projects and applications if you have a suite of tools.  Are these considered Assets for Expression Media?  That would be cool.

Templates

The way I feel Templating is best described in relationship to Styling is to say that Styling helps describe the visual appearance of one or more elements, while templating describes the Element tree that makes up a visual entity.  For instance, my button above used a template to combine two Ellipses and a Rectangle.  But an ellipse on each end of the Rectangle and you’ve got a rounded edge button.

To get started with templating, I right click on the standard button and drilled down to Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Create Empty.  If you’ve done cool stuff with your element already, you can Edit Copy and apply that to other elements rather than start over.  I’ll go over a demo to create a pretty cool button that uses lots of composite elements to have rollover effects (glow), transition effects, etc.