Unni's Blog : Blend

TabletPC and the Blend menus

unnir — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:24:00 GMT

If you do run into a situation where the Blend flyout menus appear on the left instead of the right as shown below, the Tablet PC Settings panel is a good place to check.

Blend, WPF and resource references

unnir — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:55:00 GMT

A number of people have sought more clarity around how Blend and resources references work inside WPF projects. Hope the following FAQs would help with some of your questions.

a) Should I use Static or Dynamic resource lookup?
Blend def. plays better with dynamic resource lookups. You could use a static resource lookup as long as the resource was not located or merged into App.xaml. People have raised concerns around performance issues with dynamic resource lookups (you pay for what you get). While that might be true, an interesting data point is that the Expression Blend source code uses a ton uses dynamic resource lookups for our own UI (of course, we too use static resource lookups in places where the resource would never change, or where it not possible to use a dynamic resource extension, for example non-DPs).

b) If I had to used a static resource lookup, why don't things work when the resource is located in App.xaml?
When a static resource lookup is done inside the Blend design surface, unfortunately, the resource ends up being looked inside the Application object of Blend (which is in itself a WPF application). This does not play well with the way we host the design surface - we don't want to merge the user resources into the Blend Application object to avoid conflicts with the Blend UI styles. Please be assured that solving this problem is pretty high our wish list (and we are working with the WPF team on a solution).

c) How can I create a control library of resources and use those resources in a different project?
Here is an example solution that shows you the setup.

d) What is a recommended pattern for organization of resources into external resource dictionaries?
Where there is no single pattern that I have noticed and it really depends on your scenario, an interesting data point is that the Blend source code itself only consists of a few resource dictionaries - we have one for a bunch of colors and brushes, and one for the styles for the common controls we use in our UI. Of course, we have two sets of these - one each for the Expression Dark and Light themes. Of course, fewer number of resource dictionaries helps with better performance inside Expression Blend.

e) What if I was instantiating resources from code? How can I make my application more design-time friendly?
Here is a blog post that might help.

Blend 3 Extensibility

unnir — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:27:00 GMT

Based on popular customer feedback, we have added a number of new extensibility points in Blend 3 (sorry, no support for plugins, yet, but who needs an officially supported extensibility model anyway? :) )

Over the next few weeks, I will provide more information on these, including interesting use cases that are already starting to pop up. Here is a quick listing of what we currently support:

Project and item templates: We support the same formats as Visual Studio, with some very minor modifications to suite our user experience. User project and item templates can be copied into C:\users\username\Documents\Expression\Blend 3\ProjectTemplates and \ItemTemplates respectively. We do not support wizards yet.
The Blend Asset Library

Ability to register your custom controls. For example, to register a control library Foo.dll, all you need to do is to add the path to the control library as a value of the following registry key - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Expression\Blend\v3.0\Toolbox\Silverlight\v3.0\MyCustomControlLibraryKey. If this were a WPF library, the key you would setup is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Expression\Blend\v3.0\Toolbox\WPF\v3.5\MyCustomControlLibraryKey
Adding an asset adds necessary assemblies to your project
Support for custom control icons
Setting custom properties on your control when they get instantiated - DefaultInitializer.

Design surface for custom controls

Custom context menu commands
Adorners
Selection/object manipulation APIs

Property grid extensibliity - same support as Blend 2, with a few minor additions here and there

Some other notes:
Blend 3 will share the same extensibility model as the next version of Visual Studio.

As we live in a world where there is greater and greater parity between WPF and Silverlight, we wanted the same for these APIs wherein you could use the same design time code to target controls for both platforms. To accomodate this, we had to make some minor breaking changes to the VS 2008 APIs (hopefully the changes will be very straightforward to adapt to) - I will try to post a number of samples to help out with this. By and large, the APIs remain the same as documented here (the documentation will be updated to reflect the breaking changes at a later date).

The APIs are not final yet, and are subject to change. Hopefully, we can keep the changes to a minimum.

Team Foundation Server support in Blend 3

unnir — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:47:00 GMT

Expression Blend 3 Preview adds support for integration with Team Foundation Server, one of our top feature requests.

Some examples of the various integration points:
a) Saving a file automatically checks it out
b) Adding a new UserControl or assets to a project automatically adds them to source control
c) Renaming or deleting files automatically renames or deletes items under source control
d) Right clicking on an item that has been modified under source control allows you to submit that particular change
e) View history, get latest versions of files or specific versions, undo changes, etc.

To enable source control for a solution open inside Blend, the solution must be bound and residing in a valid workspace on the client. You can refer to the Visual Studio documentation on how to setup a solution under TFS source control here.

While you don't need to have Visual Studio 2008 installed on the machine to avail TFS support inside Blend, you do need to install Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer, a free download. You also need to install SP1 of Team Explorer, and a hotfix for Team Explorer SP1 that enables TFS support inside Blend - you can download that from here.

Enjoy!