Building compelling and usable UI should be easy and fun. We all can point to our favorite products (either the ones we build or the ones we use) and think about how much better it would be if the UI was simple, intuitive and easy to use.
Whether you choose to build rich desktop applications using WPF or slick web-based applications using Silverlight, Expression Blend can help you design a great user experience.
Recently, we released the Expression Blend 3 Preview, which continues to deliver features that enable a workflow for designers and developers from the design phase to production.
Here are a few of the interesting features available in the Blend 3 Preview.
Adding Interactivity without Code
Behaviors are re-usable chunks of code that can be dragged and dropped onto any object, giving that object interactivity without having to write any code. For example, you can drop the DragMove behavior onto a button on the artboard, run your application, and then instantly be able to drag the button around the application window. In the photo editing application below, the user can drag the green button onto the picture to show the brightness at that point in the photo.
Behaviors follow a design pattern extended from the Trigger and Action model in WPF and are available for use in both Silverlight and WPF. Therefore, behaviors can navigate, change state, validate input, talk to web services, or play animations and sound. Blend 3 will ship with a set of general purpose behaviors including behaviors that navigate between pages in an application, simulate physics on a control, and run animations, but the model is entirely extensible so you can create your own reusable building blocks of interactivity. Behaviors, like user controls, can be defined in a library or as of the application itself, and will be automatically included in your assembly. For more ideas or to share your own behaviors, check out the Expression Gallery.
Seeing is Believing with Sample Data
At design time, you may not have access to the live data that will eventually display in your application. Without data, it’s very hard to get a good feel for how your application will look at runtime. Blend 3 helps solve this problem by enabling you to quickly create sample data that you can work with on the artboard to make it easier to customize those controls that will display data. Additionally, you can decide if you want to use live data during runtime: the sample data bindings are stored in design time properties. At runtime, live data can override sample data, or you can continue working with the sample data when testing your application.
When creating sample data, you can either import data from an XML file or choose to let Blend generate data for you. Generated data is fully customizable and can include flat collections, hierarchical collections, strings, numbers, Boolean values, and images. When you drag data items onto the artboard, Blend 3 interprets the values to determine the best way to display the data. For example, if the item is a path to an image file, the image is displayed. If the item is a collection of image file paths, a list box of images is created.
Embracing the Design Ecosystem
One of the new features of Expression Blend 3 Preview is the ability to import Photoshop (.psd) and Illustrator (.ai) files directly into Blend. Layers are imported as individual layout containers to make them easy to work with. Vector layers are imported as vectors, text layers as text with significant font information remaining intact, and gradients as gradients. Additionally, you can take a Photoshop file, import it into Blend 3, and then quickly convert it to a control skin using the new state-based control skinning!
Collaboration Powered by TFS
Expression Blend 3 is now integrated with Microsoft© Team Foundation source control. This means that project source files can now be easily shared by a team with all the benefits of source control. This minimizes the risk that one person might inadvertently overwrite the changes that someone else made to a file. At any time, you can view an older version of a file and compare it to the current version to see the changes that were made.
These are just some of the highlights of Blend 3.
For a complete list of new and enhanced features, such as Intellisense in the XAML editor, a built-in code editor, and design time annotations, check out the “What’s new” link. Then, download the preview, visit the Expression team blog, and watch the following videos for more tips:
· The Future of Expression Blend
· Integrating Expression Blend with Adobe Creative Suite
· Creating Interactivity with Expression Blend
Namaste!
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Soma,
This is all cool stuff. Most developer meetings and events (like PDCs, MIX, user community meetings) that I go to, I notice that developers are very excited about Silverlight, Blend, etc. I am too! Blend is an awesome product.
Can you tell us what is Microsoft doing to make Silverlight ubiquitous (besides the successful Olympics and Democrat convention stories)? Any updated figures on user adoption?
There are 3 major complaints I have with the way how Microsoft is doing things recently:
1. Delivering half-baked products:
How can Microsoft release products like WPF without a proper datagrid control? How can anyone adopt Silverlight without a decent datagrid control? Sure you can say there are 3rd party options - but Microsoft needs to provide these basic controls for any UI technology to be successful quickly. The codeplex datagrid for WPF has several annoying bugs and doing validations with template columns when using a datatable (as itemsource) is a pain. AJAX solution for ASP.NET is also a half-hearted effort/release so far.
2. Releasing a new technology and then pulling the plug on it soon afterwards.
LINQ to SQL is perfect example of this. People lose confidence due to such actions. First of all, why have so many ways of accessing data: Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, ADO.NET, etc, etc? Just like WPF for UI and WCF for communication, why can't we get a standard and EASY way of accessing data without having to learn 10 different techniques?
3. Videos for various technologies are cool but not good enough (at msdn, asp.net and silverlight.net)
Many ASP.NET, Silverlight and videos on other latest technologies from Microsoft do not demonstrate examples by accessing data from a database. For example, (to date) there is not a SINGLE video on the silverlight.net website that properly demonstrates how to use WCF to get data for a Silverlight 2 application. No video shows how to setup WCF for Silverlight applications. These are basic requirements for LOB applications. Not everyone is developing small websites to show off their design skills...
Similarly, many of the ASP.NET videos conveniently demonstrate capabilities of ASP.NET using Datasets or adapters. Using Datasets in web applications is a bad idea, both in terms of performance and scalability. Videos on technology should demonstrate using the right techniques, using best practices and show how the Enterprise Library can be used to achieve these.
You know what? I decided to share some of my ideas for Silverlight:
1. Promote a Silverlight version of Live Hotmail (Siverlight 3 supports better navigation and integrates with the browser well)
2. Bring out Live messenger using Silverlight (now that Silverlight 3.0 supports offline or desktop apps with reduced XAP size)
3. Convert msn videos to use Silverlight
4. Get more partners
Since you have around 450 million users of Hotmail, Messenger and msn.com is a very popular site (ranked very in terms of unique visitors or traffic) - these should be the best platforms to promote Silverlight more aggressively.
Hi Soma,
Some bummer about Major League Baseball dumping silverlight and reverting back to Adobe, that is a tough one especially when one of the reasons given was the product was too unstable.
This shouldn't come as a surprise I been telling you / Microsoft for over a year now how bad .NET and Visual Studio are and you don't listen.
Not sure what you are thinking that productivity doesn't matter and developers actually like writing massive amounts of code and using tools that are incomplete. Few more success stories like this one and we just might see the end of .NET and the re-release of VFP and VS 6.0 that will be a day to celebrate indeed !
.Mark
I have not noticed anything unstable about Silverlight or anything that causes too much concern. I have been delivering Silverlight applications for about an year now. MLB did not give details. It seems they did not adopt Silverlight and were merely evaluating or testing it out.
VS.NET and .NET are great products and technologies. There is nothing out there that is better in a complete comprehensive package.
AMEN to what SAM said:
Hey Anonymous,
If you read the article, MLB actually used it last year and experienced what they called "HIGH PROFILE GLITCHES".
Furthermore have you ever you used anything but .NET and Visual Studio? Besides what Sam said which I agree with some of it - VS is "NOT" a complete package there are "HUGE" gaps the size of the Grand Canyon that make this tool incomplete and nothing short of a miserable development environment.
Without even giving this much thought a WPF debugger is missing, lack of any data access strategy - LINQ TO SQL already received it's end of life, a "real" data centric language is nowhere to be found, N-TIER support is missing with LINQ, lack of a complete UI control set for WPF, inability to subclass UI controls in WPF and visually in winforms, the VS class browser serves no real purpose, broken intellisense, poor refractoring capabilities, numerous performance problems, missing UI designer in MVC, poor client validation paradigm in MVC. I could go on but isn't that really enough? A list like this should be an embarrassment to any development company.
With regards to your other comment about there being nothing better out there apparently MLB thought so. I won't mention a product.
VS 6.0 including VB/VFP was the "LAST" complete development tool Microsoft has released. If VS 6 was the golden age of development tools then we are currently experiencing the development tool "STONE-AGE". If Microsoft would reintroduce the VS 6 toolkit you would not be able to pay me enough money to touch VS again. There are many developers that feel likewise.
We need to quit cheerleadering and call a spade a spade so Microsoft will finally deliver a "USABLE PRODUCTIVE" toolset.
I think what Microsoft needs to do is to focus on the following:
1. Deliver one really good Data Access strategy or technique and call it Windows Data-Access Foundation
2. Release more controls for WPF and Silverlight that are stable and free of obvious bugs. I realize Silverlight 3 is coming with more features for the datagrid - but please make sure its useable and template columns don't carry idiosyncracies. Formatting data in Silverlight 2 is annoying. What's the problem with having a Format String property? Why should we have to write converters in code-behind for such a simple presentation task?
By the way, I really think that Sketch Flow in Blend 3 is very productive and a "one of a kind" feature in a commercial product. So, compliments to the Blend/Silverlight teams!
3. Update public facing products like Live Maps, Live Hotmail, Live Messenger, Live Spaces more frequently. Microsoft seems to have forgotten Live Maps! Change MSN Videos to have Silverlight player(s) and videos in mpeg4 or wmv format. Microsoft has to show to the world that it can convert its own video site from Flash to Silverlight successfully. Set an example. Only then MLB, NBA and others will follow your lead.
4. Launch a "Microsoft Gadgets Store" or something in similar lines for Windows 7. Make available cool gadgets developed using Silverlight 3. Bring the coolness of Silverlight to life using small things that can have big impact!
Soma, do you share our input from these comments on your blog with Scott Guthrie, Ray Ozzie and other teams in Microsoft?
The TFS integration is LONG overdue. Will Expression Web 3 enjoy the same capability?
Publicación del inglés original : Sábado, 4 de abril de 2009 a las 10:07 PST por Somasegar La creación
Midas79 - Yes, Web3 will have TFS Integration as well.
Erik Saltwell -
Group Program Manager
Expression Web
Hi Sam,
I'm the Program Manager on the WPF DataGrid control and I'd like to understand the issues you're running into. If you could provide more details about the problems you've had, I can work with you to try to find solutions and will record your feedback for future improvements to the control.
Thanks,
Samantha
Sam, thank you for your ideas on improving and promoting Silverlight. We will take them under advisement.
Polita Paulus
Developer Division
Microsoft
@Polita: Your welcome. Any plans for "Silverlight Lite" on Windows 7 Mobile and iPhone?
Cool Silverlight applications can give Windows Mobile a big boost as well - if you guys can work it all out!
Good Luck!