It’s a first gen MacBook Pro that I have had since June and other than my battery swelling up like a marshmallow in a microwave last week, my experience with this machine has been fantastic… Vista is running flawlessly…

And look at those scores… Sweetness… My MediaCenter running Vista didnt even get these scores….

Gonna use this on my project that kicks off today… http://fortes.com/2007/03/20/bindablerun/ (now can you make me a custom tight wrap?

Peter Bright writes about Windows Vista. In his look under the hood he talks about WPF and XAML

ars technica has to be one of my favorite web reads ever. Good quotes…

“If you as a developer don’t migrate your application, there’s a good chance that your competitor will migrate theirs, making you look bad.”

Alot of exciting news about Apollo today so its good get reminded about why WPF is so exciting…

“But WPF is new. The .NET classes that make up WPF are not wrappers of some lower-level API; they are the API. If you want to use WPF, the .NET classes that make it up are your first port of call.”

Last week I was trying to show my wife ChatBlender… (yall know how it goes… “No really honey… this is really something amazing you wont think its boring…okay…hmmm… so maybe its only cool to us geeks…”)

After I showed it to her via a messenger conversation where I was passing pictures of our newborn daughter… She responds… “I can only see her forehead?”

I told her to resize the window using the splitter bar between the edit area and the display area… Which got me to thinking that it would be nice to have an easy toggle for the split view… So I hooked one up and updated CHATBlender. (In the image below, the toggle is the square icon on next to the “Clear/Delete” button.)

Wondering what the best default state is… Fullscreen view or SplitView? If you have any opinions send me email at chatblender@identitymine.com

Just downloaded and installed the latest.

Looking better every time! Coolest new feature that I dont remember being available in Beta 1 is Adobe Illustrator .AI import which will be incredibly useful

Totally worth upgrading ASAP. Beautiful samples. Great springboards for building things.

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/Expression-Blend/try.mspx

Sweet I think I might actually beat Mike Harsh to a post about a cool new wpfe app.  Of course I kinda have the inside scoop since Than is my next door neighbor and I think I saw him hit the submit button from my kitchen window

Check out his post about a rock paper scissors game he built in WPF/E at http://thannap.com

Pretty cool use of video… and his playful banter is a hoot… I think he rigged the game for my IP address to lose everytime though heh heh

Welcome to a new category of posts that I will be doing… You can filter by Designer Tips to see all the relevant tips rather than all my boring posts. We have been doing alot of training lately and I intend these posts to suppliment the training courses I have given and to give a peak as to what kind of things designers learn from our courses.

Ok let me start this post by saying Im a huge Blend sellout. I love the tool. It’s a bit unfair because Ive been using it longer than most… Not as long as Manuel Clement but close    Because of the amount of time I have been using it I have overcome alot of hurdles and nothing about the experience seems blatantly wrong to me. Kudos to the Expression teams…you truly are tapping into the needs of the designer… its just that most designers dont know it yet and when they sit in front of this app for the first time they long for the old days when they were only responsible for high quality bitmaps…

I think one of the challenges designers have is that they have to hit both the curve of WPF and have to hit a similar curve about using tools that “blend” developer concepts with designer concepts. I think all designers who stick with it will have the same kind of “aha” moments that Karsten refers to in his mini essay.

With these designer tips I dont want to focus on how you can do things that are defacto standard user behaviors that most designers already know from using existing design apps (how to use bezier curves, how to pan and zoom). 

I do want to focus on quick tips that really make a big difference in your ability to do user interface design that Ive never seen exposed before in other tools… So for the inaugural Design Tip I want to post one of my favorites:

Design Tip #1 Using Blend’s “Change Layout Type” to switch between WPF and WPF/E layouts

When I am mocking up UI in apps like Design, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc I dont have access to stacking or docking layout behaviors. I have to simulate it with absolute positioning which can be incredibly time consuming. On the other hand with Blend I get tons of layout behaviors that can significanlty speed up my prototyping and actual user interface layout execution.

Im specifically typifying this design tip as a WPF to WPFE workflow because I have had such success with doing this recently in creating CHATBlender.  CHATBlender has UI docked to the right and bottom which isnt really that easy to do with the WPF/E because it only has Canvas for layout. So to allow for interesting docking and resize functionality that you get for free in WPF you need to write script to position your elements… However that is pretty limiting to the designer and I really want to be able to test out the resize/relayout behavior with my design before I did all the work to convert the UI to WPF/E with tons of javascript based layout hacks.

Here is how Blend makes this fantastically easy:

Blend has features that allow you to convert existing layouts from one kind to another kind. When the layout is converted Blend does its best to approximate where the positioning should be.

In this screenshot I have created some StackPanel UI using Blend.

After I have created my UI, I convert it from a StackPanel to a Canvas for use in a WPF/E project.

This is incredibly useful when you have UI that is sized by layout and not given a hard coded width and height that is usually necessary in a Canvas layout or WPF/E solution.

Knowing that I can do this, here is my workflow simply put:

1. First I create a layout in Blend using Grids, StackPanels etc
2. Then I test and refine my layout in Blend and verify in a standalone window.
3. Then I right click my layout panel and  use Blend to convert the layout type to a Canvas.
4. Then I hand strip WPF XAML into WPF/E (mostly removing alignments and margins)
5. When I am all done I paste the Canvas and elements into my WPF/E project and then hook up JavaScript to manage layout.

Here is a screenshot of ChatBlender as I designed it using WPF layouts.

OK now the cool part… Here is why this shouldnt just be typified as only a WPF to WPF/E workflow…

Try going the other way…

In fact start in Expression Design and draw UI that simulates layout… For example I could draw my stacking Ellipses that we saw in the screenshot above and then when I import the UI as a Canvas into Blend I can use “Change Layout Type” to convert to a StackPanel. My experience has been that you lose some Margin information that you would expect to be there but otherwise you will gain valuable hours back into your day and you will plug into a workflow with other designers who only use Expression Design or existing tools that can export XAML but are not “layout aware”.

This rocks! Ive needed layouts like this alot.

http://www.nickthuesen.com/?p=15

CHATBlending that is….

I was hoping to have this propped up to a labs.identitymine.com website but we dont have that set up quite yet… But soon…

In the meantime I want to point to a cool WPF/E sample we have been working on at IdentityMine  called “CHATBlender“. ( cool we got www.chatblender.com too)….

It’s basically Mike Harsh’s WPF/E pad but hosted in MSN Messenger (Screenshot)

This is a pretty useful tool for sharing XAML assets (only WPF/E right now). If you use Messenger like we do, you can use it to pass assets around from designer to designer, from designer to dev, or up the chain to get approval!

Just type in some XAML and hit the “SEND” button!

We have a ton of ideas we are working on to extend this… For example we are working on getting direct cut and paste from Expression Design to work.

We should be fixing alot of bugs and making  the install experience easier too. Right now you have to copy an XML file to Program Files / MSN Messenger and the completely close and exit MSN Messenger… when you start up Messenger you will see a new activity available… but only when you are in a specific conversation with a buddy.

For the complete 411 on CHATBlender visit this help doc.

http://www.identitymine.com/chatblender/help.aspx