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Celso Gomes has a new site up called nibbles : snack tutorials for hungry designers . In his words: The concept of nibbles is simple: snack tutorials for hungry designers. The tutorials will teach a few steps at a time, so they will be short and easy to follow - the perfect creative snack. There are a few tutorials on using Expression Blend and Silverlight already up, with content on Blend and WPF coming soon. New additions will be announced on the nibbles blog . Read More...
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One area that is currently top of mind for me is designer and developer collaboration with WPF and Expression Blend, in particular around animation. I'd like to start documenting some techniques and outlining things that can and can't be done. Before diving in, let's quickly review the animation system in WPF. The two ways to do animation in WPF is either declaratively (XAML) or procedurally (code). If you use Expression Blend to create your animations, you will be in effect using the declarative (XAML) method. What gets slightly confusing is that the two methods, declarative and procedural, are not entirely in parallel. For example, the only way to begin an animation declaratively (XAML) is through the < BeginStoryboard > tag. However, the equivalent call in code is to call the Begin method off a UIElement and passing it the storyboard to fire. The other option is to call the Begin method from a storyboard itself, passing it the UIElement to which the storyboard should be applied. Read More...
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I'm here at the Facebook Developer's event down here in San Francisco. Dan'l Lewin from Microsoft was on stage as a parter: Lots of good stuff announced as far as Facebook/Microsoft partnership: Microsoft just released a great wrapper to the Facebook API written by the guys at Clarity Consulting . They've got some nice sample applications, including a cool WPF app that is a rolodex of your Facebook contacts. Also, Popfly also added support for the Facebook API to their mashup builder. Speaking of Silverlight, there's support for Silverlight in FBML via the FB:Silverlight tag, although it is undocumented right now and not quite there. However, you can host Silverlight in an iframe using FBML. More on that to come. I implemented in an updated version of Flitterbook, which you can download here . This version of Flitterbook now has support for the Facebook API and pulls all images from your friends along with Twitter feeds and Flickr data. Again, this is still alpha code: no promises! One Read More...
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I just posted three new hands-on labs for Expression Blend that were created for MIX but haven't been posted for the world yet. There's lots of little nuggets in there worth checking out, things like creating a user controls, databinding, triggers, styling controls, using web services, paging, data input and more. The more I use Blend, the more I love it, but it has its own learning curve , above and beyond WPF. The first lab is a UI for Windows Live Search , including Image Search. The second lab is a color swatch lab . The third lab is a recipe viewer application . Read More...
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The Expression Blend team quietly announced their excellent designer surface for Windows Presentation Foundation went to Release Candidate status. The new build has a bunch of fixes but no new features (that I'm aware of) over the most recent CTP. It does however introduce some spectacular starter samples built using Blend. If you have a creative bone in you, I really recommend downloading Blend RC and taking it for a spin. Either way, check out the ClickOnce powered online samples that the ever resourceful Karsten has posted. I know Robbie and Nathan are impressed. Read More...
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Expression Blend Release Candidate 1 is now available for download . The product keeps getting better, able to render more on its design surface, more stable, better documented and tons of great new samples. The samples are quite crisp from a design point of view with a designer's eye. I've posted screenshots of all six and uploaded three of them via ClickOnce using the Publish Wizard in Visual Studio so that you can run them directly: Animation Studio : This is a nifty little animation drawing tool. Color Swatch : An app that allows you do envision different color possibilities for interior decorating. GrandPiano : Play the piano! Photo Book: Flipping a book of images using 2 1/2 D. Video Shelf: Video mapped onto 3D planes, library like navigation. 3D Studio: A motorcycle with particular camera moves to highlight different features Read More...
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This summer, I posted a five day course for WPF . While this content is all still relevant, using a blog to disseminate this information is, well, so old school. Unless I constantly update the post, it doesn't have all the latest and greatest sites, tutorials, books and more. Wikis make so much more sense for this purpose, such that the content stays fresh and, as new content comes online, others can update it. Hopefully, that will happen up on the Learning WPF and Expression Blend Wiki page , which is a great resource. The big thing missing from that five day course is Expression Blend training. Blend is trickier to learn, as reading about using it is much less helpful than watching someone else use the tool and then trying it yourself. There is now a decent amount of screencasts and labs out there for learning Blend, but (until now) you had to know where to look. To make this easier, I've aggregated these up on the Learning WPF and Expression Blend Wiki page . Included in that list is Read More...
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You can now go download Expression Blend Beta 2 as well as Expression Design Beta 1 . Both applications have received significant work since their last incarnation with tons of bugs fixed. Go give 'em a whirl. Read More...
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