Patrick’s Bytes

Every time when I apply leave just to relax, I would either go out of town or go learn something new. Most of the time I will end up learning a technology I wanted to check out for sometime. It could be a competing technology like Ruby on Rails, or something developed by Microsoft but not on my scorecard. That is exactly what I strike out to learn today, Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Expression Blend 2.

Just in case your don’t know Blend is part of Expression Studio and it is a tool for designers to create rich interactive user interface applications based on WPF or Silverlight technology.

So what I am keen to find out (because I did some talks on Smart Client recently)in Blend is how to create Smart Client application using WPF which has a lot of funky user experience. To get myself a jumpstart I refer to a new book, Foundation Expression Blend 2. The book is using September preview of Blend and some content might be outdated. Let me warn you first, the author of this book is a designer and not really a developer, and sometimes the comparison he made in the book is confusing for developers but they are OK for designers. For example, his non stop referencing of C# as the code behind language of XAML but never mention about Visual Basic. Commenting that CLR is just like Adobe’s Flash Player (CLR can do so much more!)

Just finished Chapter 5 (total 15 chapters) of the book and I found some of the stuff I like a lot about WPF or Blend:

1. Brush Transform Control to manipulate the gradient setting of any UIElement
2. Ability to store any design part or properties such as color setting as a resources so you can reuse it throughout the project.
3. Layout Controls acts like container to different UI Elements and they come in different forms like Grid layout, Canvas, panels, Scroll View and Borders. Each has different way on how you want to layout your control. Something hard to do with WinForm programming.
4. Additional development view (on top of XAML and Design) called Split view which also available in Visual Studio 2008

Screenshots

 Brush Transform

Local Brush Resources

Layout controls

Split view (Design view on top with XAML on the bottom)

The team went back to school yesterday at Multimedia University, Cyberjaya.  Actually we gave talks to audiences working in Cyberjaya on new Visual Studio 2008 features. Me and Poh Sze tag team and started the 1st session of the day with the topic “Breakthrough with VS2008″.

Here is the slides on the topics we covered (Hosted on Windows Live Folders)

Features we covered include

1. Ease of Smart Client deployment
2. ASP.NET 3.5
3. Windows Communication Foundation as a unified framework for distributed programming
4. Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) (SQL & XML)
5. Visual Studio Tools for Office
6. Windows Mobile 6 development with connection WCF and LINQ

VS2008 and .NET 3.5 although is just incremental updates to .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 but it comes with such a rick set of features that we can’t cover all in 1 hour and 15 minutes so here are some links for you to find out more

1. Workflow Foundation (http://netfx3.com/content/WFHome.aspx)
2. WPF Composite App Framework (www.codeplex.com/prism)
3. ASP.NET 3.5 Enhancements (http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/)
• Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET MVC Framework
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
4. Client Application Services for Win Form/ WPF (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384339.aspx)

However if you really keen to go deep like Level 300 stuff as regards to Microsoft’s .NET technologies, then better check out Tech.Ed South East Asia 2008 event at KLCC Convention Centre from 11-14 August 2008