Havent watched it yet but if its anything like Kurt’s shoes made out of baseball’s then its gotta be fun and interesting…

http://visitmix.com/Blogs/Joshua/identitymine/

Here is the source code for a sample that I was going to demo at Mix but we ran out of time.

http://blendables.com/files/folders/samples/entry49.aspx

I will follow up with more tutorial info but in the meantime its a very simple sample… It switches the template on a control based on the width of the root window element in the application.

I realize the template switching in reading experiences like newspaper front pages is a much larger problem than I solve here but this is an incredibly useful tool for me to build solutions that require switching based on window size.

 Here is the quick run down of the sample:

//First you need to add references to blendables essentials or this wont work at all. Notice that I have given the Window element an x:Name of RootWindow :

<Window
xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation”
xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml”
xmlns:blendables=”http://schemas.identitymine.com/blendables”
x:Class=”TheOldSwitcheroo.Window1″ x:Name=”RootWindow” Title=”The Old Switcheroo”
Width=”500″ Height=”500″>
<Window.Resources>

//Next I define the two different control templates I want to switch between:

<ControlTemplate x:Key=”ControlTemplate1″ TargetType=”{x:Type Control}”>
<Grid>
<Ellipse Fill=”#FF4D6AA4″ />
</Grid>
</ControlTemplate>

<ControlTemplate x:Key=”ControlTemplate2″ TargetType=”{x:Type Control}”>
<Grid>
<Rectangle Fill=”#FFB43C3C” />
</Grid>
</ControlTemplate>

//Then I define a NumericRangeObjectMap resource that says when the value is 0 – 650 use ControlTemplate1 and When it is 650 to infinite use ControlTemplate2.

<blendables:NumericRangeToObjectConverter x:Key=”NumericRangeToObjectConverter”>
<blendables:NumericRangeObjectMap From=”0″ To=”650″ Value=”{StaticResource ControlTemplate1}” />
<blendables:NumericRangeObjectMap From=”650″ Value=”{StaticResource ControlTemplate2}” />
</blendables:NumericRangeToObjectConverter>

</Window.Resources>
<Grid x:Name=”LayoutRoot”>

//Then I call the converter in the Template property of my control and pass it an ElementName of RootWindow and a Path of ActualWidth.

<Control x:Name=”TemplateSwitcherControl”
Template=”{Binding Path=ActualWidth, Converter={StaticResource NumericRangeToObjectConverter}, ElementName=RootWindow}”/>
</Grid>
</Window>

If you havent downloaded it yet do so now! Very cool FlipTile3D rocks! TransitionPresenter is off the chain (sorry stole that from Mike Harsh)… Gotta give it some performance tests to see how I like it full screen but I gotta say the Horizontal Wipe is StarWarsErrific!

http://work.j832.com/

Since we were on stage showing off our comic reader experiment we did last week I think its only appropriate to call out that today, May 5th, is Free Comic Book Day… http://www.freecomicbookday.com/sponsors.asp

Im gonna rustle up some neighbor kids and take them down to our local shop and see what we can find.

I was pretty excited when I got to the airport on Wednesday to fly home and I saw Arturo Toledo reading comic books at the gate.

A great write up on our talk at http://www.tcj.com/journalista/?p=348

A couple of unfair statements but overall somebody who is as passionate about this as we are.

One hard quote is “Dunlap and Ingebretsen make it sound as though they were among the first people to come up with the idea of digital versions of comic book; far from being leading-edge in the matter, however, they’re actually eating vapor trails.;”…. Fortunately all the sessions are available online so you can clearly hear us say that we dont feel like we are doing anything innovative here.

Really the major motivation was to create a comic reader that took advantage of WPF platform benefits like hardware acceleration and XAML support. I think we did that and I think the reading experiences is all the better because of it.

We worked really hard to make sure we maintained a consistently high frame rate for our animations while supporting very high resulotion artwork that can scale across multiple media types. Something that I havent seen in the other CBR and CBZ readers. No real magic here… We just figured out how to use the BitmapScalingQuality features of WPF at the right time.

Great conversation about the business model in this post… Honestly we dont have much to say about this…yet. Agenda #1 is done (Mix 07) and now we are on to figuring out where we go next with this project. Im hoping we do something because it would be sweet to keep working with the comic book industry and helping to forward a group of artists that I have immense respect for.

I will keep yall updated on comic book happenings and will be categorizing my posts under “comics”. We will have an aggregated Comics feed at http://blog.identitymine.com/blogs/comics soon too. (Check out the post about how we created artwork for IdentityMen that is already there)

The talk is live on the web! streaming via Silverlight!

Man! We’ve been so busy making these things I havent fully realized how unbelievably cool these things are… Im pretty biased since I worked on them but there are a few that are a bit over my head to realize what this really means.

Im sitting in the back of the room watching Jonathan Russ present his contributions to blendables and the work he did on a Microsoft Dynamics project. The buzz is definitely starting…  From the back I can see a bunch of people very engaged and actively whispering.

Jonathan just created debug output in dbmon using only markup and his EvalBindings… Big deal to me cuz I love doing expressions in properties like I did in DHTML.

Stuart Mayhew from Erain just demoed bitmap effects in StandOut! Stuart is an amazing designer and if you havent had a chance to see his work you really oughtta. Seriously amazing framerate using full screen bitmap blur effects. Totally looked like a broadcast quality rendered video from a compositing application like AfterEffects. I love ElementSnapshot!

Josh Wagoner is showing how he built the Accruent application using WPF3D.

Suweet! Josh just built a 3D video carousel a la North Face, completely in markup in just a couple of minutes. It supported databinding, filtering, hit testing and a ton of other stuff… Rock on!

I better get ready to go up front and field questions in our developer/designer QA panel. 

Ah warm red bull in the morning… Must be a vegas thing. Guess I will have two.

Catch Kevin’s talk at Delfino 4101A. He used to be my one my managers when I was working at MS. He is the guy who has made the reader experience apps happen.

I will be giving a quick demo of a templating solution using NumericRangeToObjectConverter from blendables