At IdentityMine all of our designers are using the latest MacBooks and the whole office is a sea of Apple Cinema Displays… Joshua Allen stopped by and interviewed us about it. (Its always embarrassing to have to see myself on video… )

In the video I show how I use Bootcamp and VMWare Fusion to create a compelling dev/design environment for Silverlight. Pretty cool that you can dev and debug in VS2008 and test in Safari Mac and Mozilla Mac as well as all the standard Windows browsers without a reboot.

http://visitmix.com/blogs/Joshua/IdentityMine-Mac/

Very exciting news!

Of course this means no more free betas… But definitely this is a great tool to add to your arsenal.

Real bugaboo until we found this MSDN article.. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms753303.aspx

Basically if you are creating a dll that you are going to reference fonts from.. Then dont use pack syntax but do this:

FontFamily=”/FontLibrary;Component/#IngebretsenNeato”

Okay, so Josh is getting some major kudos right now… He gave me one of those brain dead obvious solutions… That my brain was too dead to figure out on its own.

I find myself frequently animating opacity on objects that I need to set visibility on at the end of the animation so they receive no input.

Normally because Blend makes it so easy to animate any dependency in WPF including enumerations like Visibility I usually end up just setting the Visibility to Collapsed at the end of my animation… Then I have to set my Visibility back to Visible at the beginning of my animations.

This gets to be really cumbersome to manage… So last night Josh says “Why don’t you just use a trigger on your controls to set them to Visibility=’Collapsed’ when their Opacity=’0′”… I wanted to say “Because… It wasn’t my idea.” But alas, I tried it out and it works like a charm.

<Trigger Property=”Opacity” Value=”0″>
  <Setter Property=”Visibility” Value=”Collapsed” />
  <Setter Property=”IsHitTestVisible” Value=”False” />
</Trigger>

It’s as simple as that… I even when the extra mile to set IsHitTestVisible to false because I was extra paranoid that I had really made my controls inaccessible.

Microsoft feature request:

I need triggers and trigger collections to be resources…

I am winding down on a project that I have been burning it from both ends on and am just now seeing the light of day… Been trying to remind myself to post these tips because I usually forget this stuff later on.

First trick that Josh Wagoner, our superstar dev at IdentityMine, turned me on to was the ability to create MultiTriggers with both triggers on data and property changes.

The trick? RelativeSource={RelativeSource Self},

Currently you have two ways to trigger on multiple value changes… The first is a MultiTrigger that accepts properties for its conditions, and a MultiDataTrigger that accepts databinding values for its conditions. There is no mixing of the two… Which became necessary for me on my current project…

Here is an example:

<MultiDataTrigger>
        <MultiDataTrigger.Conditions>
          <Condition Binding=”{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource Self},
             Path=IsChecked}” Value=”True” />
          <Condition Binding=”{Binding Path=AreDevelopersUseful}”
            Value=”True” />
</MultiDataTrigger.Conditions>

Architecturally it might not be the right solution…(Who am I to say… Im just a designer But does it set the designer free when he is mad dash creating with simple XML binding? Heck Ya!