I work a lot in Microsoft Expression Blend. If you do any Silverlight or WP7 development, you should too. A problem I’ve had lately is when creating a large number of User Controls. I don’t want them to contain the same content, but since they’re custom controls, there is no field for these settings in Blend.
As I mentioned before, I’ll be attending the glorious MIX conference for the second year in a row this April. Last year, Microsoft showed off IE9 and Windows Phone 7 for the first time, and good times were had by all. This year, we could either see a more timid year with more focus on sessions, or an even more astounding show than the last. Beneath are some of my wild and baseless predictions.
Unfortunately, I won’t be providing the in depth look at my recent Silverlight project that I promised earlier. It still hasn’t been shown to our prospective customer and it wouldn’t be appropriate to show it publically before that.
Instead, I’ll be breaking down some of the lessons I learned from the project into little segments like this. At one point in the project I wanted to do a more advanced color animation than color to color.
Juicy code… and Superman in bondage.
I’m finally finished with the Silverlight project I started working on about a week ago. I was given six hours (!) to work with it. This might’ve been sufficient if I knew exactly what to do and the syntax for everything I wanted to do. But as I’m still learning Silverlight, some key features became big hurdles. I’ll be posting a more in depth article on the project when I get the chance.
Right now, it’s a beautiful Tuesday in Stockholm and I feel great.
This week, I was told I’d be loaned to another project than the one I’m at currently. The new project is a Silverlight project which makes me all giddy.
The new project will last only one week but I’ll try to make the most of my time on it. I’ll be creating a dashboard for a large Swedish client. They want to be able to better visualize the data they receive from different parts of the company.
Usually, this kind of Business Intelligence solution would be handled with SSRS (Sql Server Reporting Services), but I guess this is an exception. Whether or not it will become more common is anyone’s guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this customer demo would be reusable in other situations. Reusable demo ~ more clients deciding to use functionality in said demo.
Right now; Lennart Hedlund, one of my colleagues with a sharp sense for accessories, is sketching up how the dashboard could look. I’ll be getting my hands on files tomorrow afternoon.
I’ve been catching up on the sessions I missed during MIX10. There were quite a few to say the least. I think that Christian Schormann & Peter Blois’s session on Blend 4 was one of the sessions many visitors missed due to it colliding with Joe Belfiore’s introduction to WP7.
Schormann and Blois talked a lot about a new control called PathListBox, which is totally awesome. Jump with me –>
Mix started off with a kick. As expected, the focus of the keynote on day one was the new Windows Phone 7 platform. For those of you who were there, you will remember the rather amazing pre-show entertainment. Check out a video and a long post after the jump…
Part 2
On sunday, following an excellent Italian themed lunch, the second workshop started. I’d decided to attend the session on design tools and methods. The workshop was held by the incredibly talented Rossi brothers; Guido Rossi and Luigi Rossi of Archetype…
(Part 1)
After a long and perilous journey. Michael Björn (or Bjoeeearn as the natives pronounce it) and I arrived in Las Vegas. Last night was uneventful, especially compared to Sunday so far…
Sooner or later you’ll want to send people away from your Silverlight site. Maybe to a friends page or a company’s main site? These are two ways of handling navigation easily.
Fragile Development 