been here for all of an hour and have already run into the who’s who of UI design over and over again….

Tried an oxygen bar courtesy Avenue A Razorfish… Vanilla flavored cuz its supposed to be calming… Im not calm… cramming for our talk tomorrow. Robby and I have cool stuff to show… now its just pulling it together to make a good presentation.

Got my hands on Expression Studio… Pretty exciting… Props to the marketing team… I love the box art! Cant believe Ive been using this thing since its infancy and its really in my hands in a production box.

Wow this years presentations look hot… I wish I had three of me going so I could hit more sessions at the same time. There is some really great stuff.

I pointed to www.blendables.com earlier and its now been udpated with info about our “tools and components for designers and developers”.

These are all great things to add to your tool belt. Alot of these exist because we were constantly having to use these in our projects to overcome holes in the platform. Alot of them we used because it just made the already powerful features of the platform more powerful. And alot of them are things that make things that are traditionally developer chores very easy tools for designers to use in their UI.  Our Essentials pack is really cool because it shows us investing in tools that cover tons of areas of the platform. For example we have shapes, “lookless” controls that support rich styling and templating, custom layouts, custom converters and useful dependency properties represented in this “mix”.

I will be following up with write ups and samples that use blendables on my blog. Briefly some examples of how I am using them today…

ElementSnapshot -
I use ElementSnapshot to overcome the impact of BitmapEffects on hardware acceleration. So now I can use dropshadows gratuitously throughout my apps without fear of sinking the ship.

DragAndDrop
I use this to make drag and drop scenarios as easy as…. well…. “drag and drop”. Seriously I add a listbox, add another one and then I bind their data sources and then start dragging and dropping. Its super easy and you wont believe how often you want to use it.

EvalBinding and SimpleBinding
Im a DHTML guy and when I was told I couldnt do expressions in my property syntax like I could do in DHTML I felt like it was one step backward. This solve that problem for me and more. Honestly Im still getting my head around this one but the preeminent inventor Jonathan Russ has made me look dumb countless times doing something in seconds with EvalBinding that I did with tons of code and markup.

NumericRangeToObjectConverter
Im going to do a quick demo of a templating solution I built using this one at one of the reader talks… Honestly havent had much time to work on the demo so its going to be a last minute thing… But the low down is that I built a pretty robust templating solution that works in Expression Blend with live WYSIWYG designing of the templates and live switching as you resize the window in blend… tres coolio. 

Carousel3D
Come on Josh get your blog up so I can point to you about this one
Carousel3D rocks… Recently I had a project where a client wanted the “North Face” carousel. Admit it folks you’ve been there too. Darren David rocked that one but now everybody wants something similar… Its the cliche UI piece from 2005/2006…. anyway… I dropped this puppy in my app and had a great fully functional carousel experience bound to an ItemsSource running in Blend so you can update cameras and layout.

Pie
Who doesnt like Pie? I love Pie! This is a shape that allows us to create Pie… not Pi.
I used this for the Roxio burn progress dialog that you might have seen Robby Ingebretsen demo at Expression Session events. No need to create a cool dial control… Blend ships with one! Whoohoo! But Pie allows me to create great pie charts and gauges (that can be controlled using the cool dial control

OSChecker
Its just dang useful folks cuz there are alot of people still using XP and I need to know when I can go crazy with glass windows on Vista… Which if I want to do glass windows… I need a helper and that helper is ChromelessWindow

Zoombox
Saving the best for my last quick commentary. Zoombox is my favorite of all the controls. Basically its a swiss army knife for building zom and pan scenarios into your applications. We’ve used this in maps, charts, data viz and most recently it has become the heart and soul of a comic reading experience that we have built for our Mix talk. This is one of the best controls I have worked with in the platform. It does a fantastic job of exhibiting the benefits of being built as a “lookless” control and can be deconstructed and reconstructed to fit any appy that has the concept of zoom and pan… Which believe it or not is alot of apps… Specifically since we do alot of zoom and pan transitions…

Dang sorry about this… this was supposed to be a quick write up. Got carried away… Its just how excited I am about these tools and components I guess.

If you see me at Mix pull me over and I can show you some of the cool stuff we have been doing.

Something I’m really excited about. Notice the tag line “Tools and Components for Designers and Developers”

More info coming soon… Like around Mix 07 timeframe… (which isnt very far away…. )

Yeah yeah I know… I told you I was gonna blog more info about our comic talk… but as usual Im totally swamped right now… (Clients dont seem to take well to “I couldnt get that done because I was busy blogging” excuse)

Will try and get some short posts out soon…

Ok this is one of the best explanations of styles and templates I have seen yet… Fun to read too

http://www.nickthuesen.com/?page_id=18

A tidbit of help….

Honestly I have been looking all over the SDK for info regarding this and couldnt find anything…. Been googling it and havent really nailed anything useful so I figured I would blog this just in case some poor clueless soul like me was struggling with the same issue.

So here’s the deal so far what I could figure out. FlowDocument is a type of FrameWorkContentElement which makes it a candidate for a root element of a .xaml file similar to Page, Window, UserControl etc.

The benefit I have found is that setting the source of a Frame element to a .xaml file with a FlowDocument root will implicitley create a FlowDocumentReader. This works for me since what I had been doing was creating a ResourceDictionary that hosted multiple FlowDocuments and then was setting the Document property on FlowDocumentReader.

I wanted to create a single stylesheet that all my FlowDoducments would work and store all those styles in a ResourceDictgionary but I was having some problems getting resources to work when I was creating FlowDocumentReader and setting resources on Document. Fil mentioned to me that there might be some property that isolates the resources for FlowDocuments to enable a TextBox scenario… I hunted around on my own but couldnt find it.

In the end I was able to get FlowDocuments to accept a merged ResourceDictionary when I set them up to use Frame. The only issues I have now are 1.) Its not nearly as Blend editable as it used to be. (which isnt too bad because it really wasnt all too Blend editable to begin with…. all it did was render and now Frame doesnt really render its contents…. which is better than blowing up) and 2.) I had to declare my resource dictionary that templates a new design for my FlowDocumentReader to target all FlowDocumentReaders and scope it as tight as I could. Since this was being implicitly created I couldnt put a key on it explicitly set it… I can see where this might be a problem later…

But hey I got journaled navigation out of the whole deal

(oh yeah FlowDocumentReader is pretty cool… if you dont buy into the whole columnized, paginated argument you can give your readers a choice. Pagination is great on portable devices while sometimes scrolling is just quicker on a desktop in my opinion.)

I bet this machine would run WPF apps ok.

Mac Pro

Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme
Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple wireless Mighty Mouse – U.S. English
750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
Final Cut Express HD preinstalled
Accessory kit
Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Two 16x SuperDrives
16GB (8 x 2GB)
Mac OS X – U.S. English
750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB, Stereo 3D (2 x dual-link DVI)
Apple Cinema HD Display (30″ flat panel)

Estimated Ship: Within 24 hours

Estimated Total:
$16,075.00

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201270

Yet another cool WPF project IdentityMine got to help out with.

Robby and I are presenting a really cool talk at Mix this year… Both Robby and I will be blogging about the goings on as we get closer to the date.

‘nuf said…

We’ve got a full plate at Mix this year… Sessions I will be co-presenting at described below:

https://content.visitmix.com/public/sessions.aspx

“ZAP!, WHAM!, KAPOW!”: WPF and the Next Genertion of Online Comic Book Reading
Speaker(s): Nathan Dunlap – IdentityMine, Robby Ingebretsen – IdentityMine

Audience(s): Business Decision Maker, Designer

Come see us demonstrate the development of the comic reading experience using the Microsoft Expression suite of design tools. Just as the NY Times Reader project dramatically improves the newspaper reading experience, our Windows Presentation Foundation-based approach to comic reading does the same thing for traditional print-based comic books. 

Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications that SIZZLE
Speaker(s): Nathan Dunlap – IdentityMine, Darren Laybourn – Microsoft, Josh Wagoner – IdentityMine

Audience(s): Business Decision Maker, Designer, Developer

In this session we’ll explore how amping design and taking advantage of data visualization techniques and 3D can make a major impact on usability and ultimately acceptance of line-of-business applications. We’ll follow the Dynamics AX team’s design and development of a next-generation manufacturing production planning tool from vision to eye-popping, jaw-dropping realization in WPF. A 3D application that’s productive without being gratuitous. Cool!

Check out Tim Sneath’s amazing blog post about WPF being used for the Microsoft Indexing Service.

I want to try and give this a try on my XP machine… using 3D geometries in a Viewport3D is a truly innovative way to build a powerful indexing engine..

I wonder if anti aliasing has any effect on the result set. My guess would be that super sampling would allow for more accurate queries…. similar to the way that multipass rendering results in more accurate video encoding. Guess this is yet another example of “it runs better on Vista” since XP doesnt support antialiased 3D. Since my video card can easily support 16x supersampling I bet my queries on Vista would be dead on. It would be like having Googles secret search engine sauce on my local machine…

Speaking of Google…

Google has announced the free TiSP beta Im pretty sure we will see some breakthroughs in rich frequently connected applications that can have almost immediate indexing a la the Urge/Zune Marketplace interaces we see with Windows Media Player.