Every time when I apply leave just to relax, I would either go out of town or go learn something new. Most of the time I will end up learning a technology I wanted to check out for sometime. It could be a competing technology like Ruby on Rails, or something developed by Microsoft but not on my scorecard. That is exactly what I strike out to learn today, Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Expression Blend 2.

Just in case your don’t know Blend is part of Expression Studio and it is a tool for designers to create rich interactive user interface applications based on WPF or Silverlight technology.

So what I am keen to find out (because I did some talks on Smart Client recently)in Blend is how to create Smart Client application using WPF which has a lot of funky user experience. To get myself a jumpstart I refer to a new book, Foundation Expression Blend 2. The book is using September preview of Blend and some content might be outdated. Let me warn you first, the author of this book is a designer and not really a developer, and sometimes the comparison he made in the book is confusing for developers but they are OK for designers. For example, his non stop referencing of C# as the code behind language of XAML but never mention about Visual Basic. Commenting that CLR is just like Adobe’s Flash Player (CLR can do so much more!)

Just finished Chapter 5 (total 15 chapters) of the book and I found some of the stuff I like a lot about WPF or Blend:

1. Brush Transform Control to manipulate the gradient setting of any UIElement
2. Ability to store any design part or properties such as color setting as a resources so you can reuse it throughout the project.
3. Layout Controls acts like container to different UI Elements and they come in different forms like Grid layout, Canvas, panels, Scroll View and Borders. Each has different way on how you want to layout your control. Something hard to do with WinForm programming.
4. Additional development view (on top of XAML and Design) called Split view which also available in Visual Studio 2008

Screenshots

 Brush Transform

Local Brush Resources

Layout controls

Split view (Design view on top with XAML on the bottom)