by Don Burnett
As some of you know I have been working to create a Rich Internet Application version of my website. The application is still a "work-in-progress", but I have been making a lot of progress at it. The application user interface was developed in Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2005.
The application has four screens.. To minimize screen real-estate, I used the WPF Tab control for navigation.
The splash screen looks like this..
The work screen implements the IdentityMine "Blendables" 3DCarousel Control, which is similar to Apple's "Coverflow", in that you get sorted content cards in a three dimensional space. The control is very cool and can let you databind to an XML datasource.It also uses the 3dTools.DLL from the WPF 3d team, to let you navigate in 3D. You can click on any card in 3D space and have it bring it to the front.
The contact page is almost the standard type of form you find on a website, nothing very exciting there. The media page implements streaming video over the Internet. It places a media element control, Blend was used to setup the play button, which in this case is just an image that triggers a mousedown event when the graphic is clicked on that triggers a timeline and video to be streamed or played through the media element.
And finally the blog tabitem or screen. It embeds a winforms control element alongside the WPF elements, and in this case I instantiated an IE browser control from winforms and fed it my blog's URL. Very simple but effective, and you can embed a browser in about four lines of XAML.
And that's the app at the moment. There are still some finishing touches, but it does most everything the website does and I can set it up to click install into the user's start menu using "clickonce" install or set it up to automatically start up from a DVD. Here is what the web based installer looks like.
