by Don Burnett
Coming Soon to this Blog...
Conversation, "How-to's", special guests and what you really need to know about what's going on in the ever expanding .Net Designer Community..
There will be a bi-weekly pod-cast, with every month an alternating video-cast.
by Don Burnett
If you missed the UX@UM day presentations, or are one of the many people anxious to get at the content. We have been able to upload about half of the content (the other half is coming, there is just a lot of it, and most of what is left includes video tutorials, so it's just a matter of getting it all uploaded and online. If you'd like to look at the presentations and some of the other content, you can check it out on my Windows Live SkyDrive..
Click on the drive here to access the content..
by Don Burnett
The Expression Blend 2.0 preview is out! A lot of of new features have been added including one very special one I have been waiting for as an animator. To celebrate Microsoft has added a new page to the Expression Studio Website just to showcase the new features of Expression Blend 2.0.
Here's a run down of the new features:
ANIMATION (YEAH!)
by Donald Burnett
Microsoft Expression Blend Bible
by Gurdy Leete and Mary Leete
Expression Studio has found itself without much coverage book-wise. This is quickly changing ,however, and this book is a wealth of information aimed at people new to Expression Blend. If you are new to design concepts, you will also enjoy this book because not only does it give you the technical background you need to start to create WPF applications (This book covers Expression Blend 1.0) but gives you many great examples of assembling an application. This book covers tool-by-tool all of the capabilities of Expression Blend. It also goes outside the realm of Blend and into Visual Studio for some of the more exotic capabilities of Blend to create things such as XBAP browser application. Exemplary chapters include the one on XML databinding. There is also great coverage on a subject most books and documentation is missing, when it comes to XAML, navigation across a multi-page application using the in-built "navigation" services. This makes tasks such as creating an application that uses menus and hyperlinks very easy to create. Many people consider the documentation Microsoft provides on this functionality lacking basic functionality. This is one book that delivers with great illustrated examples.
I find the book a very easy read and very comprehensive. It covers most of what you need to get started in WPF and XAML. If you are looking for extensive Silverlight coverage I suspect that will happen in a later version of the book as the author gets time to review Expression Blend version 2.
I whole heartedly recommend this book. Buy it today!
by Don Burnett
*WARNING* FIRST PARAGRAPH -A BIT OFF TOPIC
iPhone Support
Wow Box.net how great is this? This is a little bit off-topic, but a lot of people who are developing WPF and Silverlight applications, and Box.net is a very well liked company for more than a couple of reasons. So can we marry the two? They have won numerous awards for making it easy to store your files online and make them available in workgroup applications. They support accessing your files in a number of unexpected places including mobile devices, Facebook.com, and a number of other web 2.0 type platforms...
Their latest wonder is now connectivity support for the iPhone..
This allows you to access your online file storage at box.net right from your Apple iPhone.. The navigation is pretty simple, like a normal iPhone application. Seems to work flawlessly as well.. It's fast and efficient on the iPhone too.
Microsoft Expression Blend Meets Box (Introduction)
Box.Net provides a very open API for developers. You can access file sharing and Box's services directly from SOAP, XML POST, or REST API's. That means we can use them right from Expression Blend's XML data source giving Blend WPF and Silverlight instant access to online files and sharing. This opens up a whole new realm of functionality to Blend RIA developers..
First Steps (Please Note most of this is paraphrased in Box.NET's very COMPLETE developer documentation):
You'll need to sign up and obtain a Box.net API key, since you'll need to pass in your API key with every API call you make.
Box.net API authentication provides a secure way for users to authenticate with Box.net without having to share their Box.net user name or password with you. This provides a consistent, safe experience for users and makes things easier on you (since you don't have to store user credentials).
To obtain an authentication ticket, your application performs these steps:
For client applications, the user is shown a message instructing them to return to the application after they've authenticated. The application then calls get_auth_token with the ticket parameter to retrieve the authorization token.
At this point, you'll probably either want to show the user the files in their Box or enable them to upload a file to their Box.
To show a complete list of the user's files and folders, use the get_account_tree call. This call retrieves an XML document describing the entire contents of the user's box, including files and folders. You can then databind this to a XAML treeview control in Blend. You could also pass the ID of a folder as a parameter to this call, enabling your application to retrieve a subset of the tree structure.
To upload a file, your application performs an HTTP POST using a URL of the form:
http://upload.box.net/api/upload/<auth_token>/<folder_id>At the time you upload a file using HTTP POST, you can also specify whether you want the file to be publicly sharable (as described in the Upload and Download reference documentation). You can also share a file after it's been uploaded using the public_share API if you prefer.
It's that simple to work with.
This service was almost made for Blend users and is easy to implement thanks to it's support of XML and REST API's.
To Be Continued...
In an upcoming posting, I will do a walk through of creating a file sharing application using Box.Net using Expression Blend in both WPF and Silverlight that is both accessible online from the Silverlight plug-in and as full Windows WPF platform application.
