Talk about a real wizard!

Meet Peter Blois, one of my teammates at the Microsoft Expression team and a math whiz. Peter is the guy who wrote the original version of the Flickr Browsr that I used in my Channel 9 presentation. His blog, house of mirrors, is filled with fun WPF samples. Make sure you don’t miss it.

 

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer CTP released

Microsoft released today a CTP of Expression Interactive Designer: A new tool for designing interactive user interface for Windows Presentation Foundation.

Here are some useful links:

Channel 9 Video

Try Interactive Designer for free

Expression team blog

Also, here is the source code and executable (107 KB) for the Flickr Browser sample I built in the channel 9 video.

Great thanks to Peter Blois for his wonderful help providing great components that made this sample rock! 

Comments and critiques are always welcome!

 

 

PDC flashback: Sparkle Hands-On-Lab

We got the attendance/survey score yesterday: Sparkle ranked top Hands-On-Lab for PDC This is a great opportunity to thank everyone who came to the lab and had a hands on experience with the product. You guys kept us busy all three days, but it was totally worth it!
For those who did not attend PDC or missed Sparkle Interactive Designer’s HOL, Here is a summary of the lab:
The tutorial was a walkthrough to develop a simple product catalog application with real time data binding to a local XML data source. The lab adopted a workflow model that separates the content creation from the styling and finishing.

Exercise 1: Bind to the data source and create the containers:
In this exercise, you learn to use the tool to bind to a local XML file containing description of some fictitious products and links to local images.
This is how the application looks like after the first exercise is accomplished (Notice the real time data binding inside Spakrle that enables you to work with real data at design time)

Exercise 2: Styling your application
In this exercis, you learn to change the plain default look of your application to a more stylish look and feel using gradients, template editing, and layout. The screenshot below shows the results of exercise 2:

Exercise 3:Adding Visual Effects:
In this last exercise, you learn how to create simple animations, transitions and visual brush reflection effects to give your UI a more polished look.The results look similar to the figure shown below:

It took people on the average an hour to finish the tutorial. This is not bad for first time hands-on experience with Sparkle. It takes me usually less than 15 minutes to replicate the application since I know my way around the environment.
Once again, thanks to everyone who came to the lab… Feel free to post any further feedback about the lab here or email it to me: akhella at gmail dot com.

And finally, like my friend Mano always says: “It’s all vector baby!”