JCooney.NET

I’m going to be co-presenting on 2 WPF talks at CodeCamp OZ this year, which is now only a few months away. The first talk (with Mr. Charles Sterling) will be an introduction to WPF, and the second one (with Mr. Deepak Kapoor) will be focusing on data binding (at least that’s what we’ve roughed out for both talks at this stage). If there is anything in particular that you would like to see in either of these talks, any big questions about WPF that have previously gone un-answered (like…say “where is the business value in a spinning text-box rendered on a 3D cube with video playing in the background rotating above a reflective black surface”) please leave a comment. »

Congratulations to my readify colleague Dr. Greg Low for becoming a Microsoft Regional Director for Australia. I’m sure he’ll continue to be a great adapter between Microsoft and the Australian developer community. »

Today I delivered a short (45 min) intro to WPF to some folk at Microsoft in Sydney. The talk seemed to go reasonably well, and I got some good constructive feedback from some of my Readify colleagues who were in attendance (thanks guys). I think I “got thru” to at least one person because later that day they were downloading the bits and playing around with a few things. The “slides” I wrote in WPF its self (I’ve never bothered to learn how to do those cool animations in powerpoint, and I knew I could do them in WPF). The source (built against the Jan 2006 CTP) is available on project distributor here. The sort time meant that I had to focus on only a few key areas of WPF which I thought would get people interested. I looked at the “why” of WPF (not much eye candy for this part), composition and nesting, data templating/data binding, some control styling and some UI resizing and rotating (mostly just for fun). Doing the slides in WPF made the talk more educational and enjoyable to prepare for. Here is a screen-shot from the presentation featuring a databound list with Steve Ballmer, BillG and a few other MS notables being scaled and rotated.

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Although I had previously said I would be unable to attend, I did manage to get along to the SDNUG last night to watch Deepak’s presentation on WPF. The presentation was technically accurate, and it was clear that Deepak knew his stuff - covering off a bit of historical background, an intro to XAML, controls, an introduction to styling and animation, and a demo of sparkle errr….something about “interraction designer“. I was a little worried some of the audience weren’t able to put WPF into a useful context, but with such a big framework and so many things to show it is hard to know how to start off in a way that makes sense. »

Mezzoblue (cultivator of the CSS Zen Garden) have this cool thumbnail view of the “official” designs. Makes it easier to find ones you may have previously liked. »

Deepak Kapoor is speaking at the Sydney Deep .NET Users Group this Thursday (2nd of Feb) on WPF. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend due to a prior commitment. Some time ago Deepak and Nick Kramer wrote an MSDN article on WPF and WinForms inter-op, so this is a chance to get some good insights on getting started with WPF from somebody with a little background in the subject. If you’re in Sydney you should go along. »

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http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ed9f5fb2-4cfc-4d2c-9af8-580d644e3d1d&DisplayLang=en&hash=TJF7SW9 Will this be the last time I look at raw XAML? I doubt it, but can’t wait to give sparkle a try. »

After downloading sparkle when it was released a few hours ago I spent most of this evening playing around with it. Here were my first impressions:

• Doing UI with it is great, I much prefer to use it that Cider. I’ve hardly used the Cider designer since it arrived last month (mostly just editing XAML), but in Sparkle I didn’t feel the need to dig down into the XAML as much.
• The performance of the designer was slightly better than VS 2005/Cider in my VPC environment. Fast enough, and much more fully featured at this stage.
• The “gradients on everything” looked a little cheesy (especially the timeline stuff at the bottom when nothing is loaded), even for me - a programmer with the aesthetic sensibilities of a cardboard box.
• I found the UI fairly intuitive. It is weird to use an app that doesn’t have a tool-bar, but I was able to find almost everything I was looking for via the “View” menu (which revealed appropriate tool-windows of stuff). I have watched the channel nine video a few months ago of sparkle in action, so maybe I remembered a few things from there. I don’t have any experience with any Macromedia or Adobe tools, I can’t quite get the hang of the Mac OS. I have learned a few tricks in the gimp, but spend 97% of my time in VS or SQL text editors. I figure I’m the mort or even pre-mort of graphic designers.
• The documentation is quite good. I found browsing the help quite interesting.
• The code editor was interesting, but quite limited. It has intellisense but it was pretty slow. It can show different fonts in the same document (something VS 2005 cannot do AFAIK), but couldn’t see any way to change the font and colour settings and the syntax hilighting scheme, or add breakpoints.
• The ability to right-click on a control and extract a copy of the control template for that control is very cool.
• Creating simple animations was quite easy - I “got“ the timeline and creation of keyframe stuff at the bottom of the screen on my first attempt.
• No unexplaind lock-ups, crashes, vanishing, freezes, “needing to close“ or anything like that while I was using it.

Thus far I’ve only scratched the surface of Sparkle, but my first impressions have been very positive. During the course of my experimentation I made a number of extremely ugly UIs, the worst of which is shown below. As this application starts up the rectangle with the rounded corners and psychadelic background gradient and the combo box fly around the form before coming to rest at the locations shown. The dropdown portion of the combo and the checkbox have both had fairly ghastly custom templates applied to them. I’m sure in the hands of somebody with some sense of aesthetics Sparkle would be a great tool. A very credible effort for a first beta I thought.

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Phil Wright who many early .NET-ers will remember as the author of the “DotNetMagic” widget set for windows forms is going to start a micro-isv as a component vendor, and was recently speculating as to what strategies the existing players might be adopting in the face of the fairly big change in rich-client programming that is WPF. This got me wondering what the component vendor space will even look like once WPF lands - it seems like many existing components main differentiating factor from their traditional windows counterparts is the extra “look and feel” that can be applied (giving them the MS Office, Visual Studio or MS Money “theme“). WPF can do all this through templates - maybe the market will shift from buying third-party controls to buying libraries of mouth-watering control templates. Will regular developers embrace the power of themeing, or stick to battleship grey? At the moment the application design surface in Cider (where application-scoped themes would presumably reside) is not yet implemented, so its hard to forsee what kind of UI they’re planning on there. I imagine in order to be successful theme libraries would have to have some kind of “drag and drop from the toolbox onto the application surface” kind of design experience to be widely adopted, but who knows - maybe MS has something even better in mind. Perhaps control libraries with nice-looking default templates (but no additional behavior) will hit the sweet-spot?

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