You can Copy and Paste the commands below.

Open a command prompt window with administrative privileges and then run the following commands:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll”

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.Blend.dll”

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.Project.dll”

If you have installed Expression Blend 4 SP1, you must also uninstall the native image of the Microsoft.Expression.WindowsPhone.dll file from the cache by using the following command:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.WindowsPhone.dll”

What’s also rather interesting is that when installing VS11 Ultimate on to a Win 7 box you are not able to create Metro apps.

Big thanks to Steve White and Joanna Mason from the Expression Blend team for helping to resolve this issue.

Our first session will be all about building Data Data Intensive apps for WP7 and we are really looking forward to talking to you about what we have learnt building these types of applications. We are also going to show off bits from the WP7 Contrib that help to make building these types of applications easier. It’s going to be a demo packed session so hold on for a rollercoaster ride. We are making avaliable all our demos before the session so if you are attending and interested you can download these from the skydrive link at the bottom of the post.

My other session obviously will be about using Blend =P  and the title of the session is aptly named “Expression Blend for Silverlight Developers”.

The session is broken down into 3 sub sections; designer developer collaboration; Blend quick fire tips; and the main part, building out an app from a Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator visual design into a functional Silverlight app. This session is aimed particularly at developers who are just starting out with Blend, however even if you have been using Blend for a while there should be plenty of refreshers.

Now, I had thought about doing

“… this is how I create a button in Blend, and oh look I can make it into a circle and bounce across the screen…”

as much as I love attending these sessions and love the buzz afterwards sometimes it can be difficult to relate the content to a problem you may currently be working on.

Up on skydrive you will find; the .psd file I am going to use; an unstyled version; and a completed version that is styled. There is still plenty more to do so the scope is open and hopefully you will be able to use this as a reference point for future apps that you build. Therefore, I thought that it would be an interesting idea to see how attendees if they so wished can use the session as a hands-on Blend training hour, and if you want to participate then you can. Otherwise you can sit back and watch how we build a static vector graphic into a functioning app.

If you are planning on attending and would like me to cover off anything in particular I will do my best to make it happen, otherwise I would be more than happy to chat during the event, if you can bring code or have a scenario that would really help me understand the context of your questions.

You can find all of the goodies up on the sky drive folder.

See you there!

The transitions used in the WP7C are based around the great work of Kevin Marshall who originally created the transitions, we like them becuase they are lighter on memory usage and slightly faster when compared to the page transitions found in the WP7 toolkit. Now that is not too say I dislike the transitions in the toolkit, I actually really like them mainly because we have the ability to define these transitions in Xaml and hopefully there will be some future design-time support in Blend where we could run these transitions. Xaml support for the transitions is definately on the vNext list for the WP7C as we believe its important for designers to able to change, apply and understand the different transitions that are available.

When comparing implementation details, the toolkit uses a custom Frame called a Transition Frame; and WP7C does this at a page level all the pages in your app have to sub class the Animated Base Page. Other differences include; the toolkit uses a Render Transform and WP7C uses Composite Transform; the WP7C uses the XamlReader.Load to setup the storyboards, however the toolkit has specific loose Xaml files that contain the storyboards.

So the new page transitions includes the different Rotate permutations for your page transitions, I also added in some new slide and fade transitions. You can play with these and all the other different transitions by downloading the sample app.

The other thing that I decided to add into the app was a very simple implementation of the WP7C navigation service. Page transitions and navigation are interconnected, when you navigate to a page you want to execute a transition between the current page and the new page, this is approapiate when going forwards or backwards. Normally we would wire up the WP7C Navigation Service in the bootstrapper of our app and use a DI framework to new this up. In order to keep everything super simple I am using the interface and manually newing up an instance, also note that I am not using a View Model this is simply to show the flexibility of the WP7C Navigation Service.

private WP7Contrib.Services.Navigation.INavigationService navigationService;

public MainPage()
{
        InitializeComponent();

       AnimationContext = LayoutRoot;
       this.navigationService = new WP7Contrib.Services.Navigation.ApplicationFrameNavigationService(
                                   ((App)Application.Current).RootFrame);
}

Notice how we grab the RootFrame and pass this in to the constructor of the WP7C Navigation Service the same code can be used in a bootstrapper. When using the WP7C transitions there is no requirement for us to change the base class of the frame in the App’s Initalize Phone App handler like we would do when using the toolkit.

private void InitializePhoneApplication()
{
    if (this.phoneApplicationInitialized)
    {
        return;
    }

    // Create the frame but don't set it as RootVisual yet; this allows the splash
    // screen to remain active until the application is ready to render.
    this.RootFrame = new TransitionFrame();
    this.RootFrame.Navigated += this.CompleteInitializePhoneApplication;

    // Handle navigation failures
    this.RootFrame.NavigationFailed += RootFrame_NavigationFailed;

    // Ensure we don't initialize again
    this.phoneApplicationInitialized = true;
}

Instead we need to hang all our pages from the Animated Base Page, pay close attention to; the constructor where we assign the Animated Context of our base page to the LayoutRoot of our page; and the overridden Get Animation where we are deciding which transitions to fire based on the Animation Type.

namespace PageTransition
{
    using System;

    using WP7Contrib.View.Transitions.Animation;

    public partial class Slide : AnimatedBasePage
    {
        public Slide()
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            AnimationContext = LayoutRoot;
        }

        protected override AnimatorHelperBase GetAnimation(AnimationType animationType, Uri toOrFrom)
        {
            if (animationType == AnimationType.NavigateForwardOut)
            {
                return new SlideLeftFadeOutAnimator { RootElement = LayoutRoot };
            }

            if (animationType == AnimationType.NavigateBackwardOut)
            {
                return new SlideRightFadeOutAnimator { RootElement = LayoutRoot };
            }

            if (animationType == AnimationType.NavigateForwardIn)
            {
                return new SlideLeftFadeInAnimator { RootElement = LayoutRoot };
            }

            return new SlideRightFadeInAnimator { RootElement = this.LayoutRoot };};
        }
    }
}

For completeness I have covered off the different permutations of Navigating forward or backward. The implemented page transitions have a corresponding Animator which makes it straightforward to implement the type of animation that you require. And that is everything you need in order to get page transitions working in your app. Once you have implemented the transitions you want then its a fairly simple task of using the WP7C Navigation Service to navigate to a page in your app.

private void OnSelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
{
    if (AnimationList.SelectedIndex != -1)
    {
        switch (AnimationList.SelectedIndex)
        {
            case 0:
                this.navigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/View/Turnstile.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
                break;

            case 1:
                this.navigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/View/TurnstileFeather.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
                break;

            case 2:
                this.navigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/View/Continuum.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
                break;

            case 3:
                //slide right
                this.navigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/View/SlideRight.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
                break;

        }
    }
}

And we are done!

Couple of things to watch out for when implementing the page transitions

1. Make sure that you have the correct base url in you WMAppManifest.xml.
   It should look something like this

   <Tasks>
         <DefaultTask  Name ="_default" NavigationPage="View/MainPage.xaml"/>
       </Tasks>
   

   Even if you have a sub folder which contains your Views

2. If you have already overriden the OnBackKeyPress handler remember to call the base implementation

If you have created transitions and happy to share or have ideas for ones you would like to see then please contact me.

So why would you want to do this ? Well for us we need to provide an experience where the user of the app is prompted to enter in their credit card details. It seems only sensible to use the standard UI metaphor for picking a Date or a Time on WP7. As I found out this is just not possible and a level of customisation is required in order to achieve the interactions that we want along with the right experience.

This problem can be divided into two main pieces; data we will need to provided some subclassed data sources for day, month and year; UI we need to change the looping selectors visibility and do some work around hooking up the controls with data.

In the WP7 Contrib View project you can locate the DateTime Picker folder where the data sources are defined to support the picker. The main thing that we here is to reuse the same data source classes that are defined in the toolkit however we have changed the accessor to be public so that we can seem where we are using the control. The code below is here for completion and your viewing pleasure.

The Day DataSource

namespace WP7Contrib.View.Controls.DateTimePicker
{
    using System;

    public class DayDataSource : DataSource
    {
        // Methods
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the relative to.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="relativeDate">The relative date.</param>
        /// <param name="delta">The delta.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        protected override DateTime? GetRelativeTo(DateTime relativeDate, int delta)
        {
            int num = DateTime.DaysInMonth(relativeDate.Year, relativeDate.Month);
            return new DateTime(relativeDate.Year, relativeDate.Month, ((((num + relativeDate.Day) - 1) + delta) % num) + 1);
        }
    }
}

The Month DataSource

namespace WP7Contrib.View.Controls.DateTimePicker
{
    using System;

    public class MonthDataSource : DataSource
    {
        // Methods
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the relative to.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="relativeDate">The relative date.</param>
        /// <param name="delta">The delta.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        protected override DateTime? GetRelativeTo(DateTime relativeDate, int delta)
        {
            int num = 12;
            int month = ((((num + relativeDate.Month) - 1) + delta) % num) + 1;
            return new DateTime(relativeDate.Year, month, Math.Min(relativeDate.Day, DateTime.DaysInMonth(relativeDate.Year, month)));
        }
    }
}

The Year DataSource

namespace WP7Contrib.View.Controls.DateTimePicker
{
    using System;

    public class YearDataSource : DataSource
    {
        // Methods
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the relative to.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="relativeDate">The relative date.</param>
        /// <param name="delta">The delta.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        protected override DateTime? GetRelativeTo(DateTime relativeDate, int delta)
        {
            if ((0x641 == relativeDate.Year) || (0xbb8 == relativeDate.Year))
            {
                return null;
            }
            int year = relativeDate.Year + delta;
            return new DateTime(year, relativeDate.Month, Math.Min(relativeDate.Day, DateTime.DaysInMonth(year, relativeDate.Month)));
        }
    }
}

Now that we have redefined these datasources we want to use in our customised implementation the next part is to take a look at the guts of the Xaml that is being used to compose the Picker as we mentioned earlier on there is the LoopingSelector that can be found in the Primitives namespace. This control is rather nice and does what it says on the tin, by providing a gambling machine style interaction. If you take a look at the Xaml defined in the DateTimePicker.xaml this is essentially what we need, so again this is pretty much a copy and paste job. I created a new user control called MonthYearPicker.xaml and stuffed the Xaml in here. The only changes that we need to make in the Xaml is to change the visibility of the looping selector that you don’t want to present to the user, in my case this was the day. Now we could do some more sophisticated stuff here, like provide an attached Dependency Property to control the visibility of the selector this is on the list so watch this space, but if you can think of any others shout.

<!-- LoopingSelectors -->
        <Grid
            Grid.Row="2"
            HorizontalAlignment="Center">
            <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                <ColumnDefinition/>
                <ColumnDefinition/>
                <ColumnDefinition/>
            </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
            <Primitives:LoopingSelector
                x:Name="SecondarySelector"
                Grid.Column="0"
                Width="148"
                ItemSize="148,148"
                ItemMargin="6">
                <Primitives:LoopingSelector.ItemTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                        <StackPanel
                            HorizontalAlignment="Left"
                            VerticalAlignment="Bottom"
                            Margin="6">
                            <TextBlock
                                Text="{Binding MonthNumber}"
                                FontSize="54"
                                FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilySemiBold}"
                                Margin="0,-8"/>
                            <TextBlock
                                Text="{Binding MonthName}"
                                FontSize="20"
                                FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
                                Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneSubtleBrush}"
                                Margin="0,-2"/>
                        </StackPanel>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </Primitives:LoopingSelector.ItemTemplate>
            </Primitives:LoopingSelector>
            <Primitives:LoopingSelector
                x:Name="TertiarySelector"
                Grid.Column="1"
                Width="0"
                ItemSize="148,148"
                ItemMargin="6" Foreground="{x:Null}" Visibility="Collapsed">
                <Primitives:LoopingSelector.ItemTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                        <StackPanel
                            HorizontalAlignment="Left"
                            VerticalAlignment="Bottom"
                            Margin="6">
                            <TextBlock
                                Text="{Binding DayNumber}"
                                FontSize="54"
                                FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilySemiBold}"
                                Margin="0,-8"/>
                            <TextBlock
                                Text="{Binding DayName}"
                                FontSize="20"
                                FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
                                Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneSubtleBrush}"
                                Margin="0,-2"/>
                        </StackPanel>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </Primitives:LoopingSelector.ItemTemplate>
            </Primitives:LoopingSelector>
            <Primitives:LoopingSelector
                Grid.Column="2"
                x:Name="PrimarySelector"
                Width="148"
                ItemSize="148,148"
                ItemMargin="6">
                <Primitives:LoopingSelector.ItemTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                        <StackPanel
                            HorizontalAlignment="Left"
                            VerticalAlignment="Bottom"
                            Margin="6">
                            <TextBlock
                                Text="{Binding YearNumber}"
                                FontSize="54"
                                FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilySemiBold}"
                                Margin="0,-8"/>
                            <TextBlock
                                Text=" "
                                FontSize="20"
                                FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
                                Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneSubtleBrush}"
                                Margin="0,-2"/>
                        </StackPanel>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </Primitives:LoopingSelector.ItemTemplate>
            </Primitives:LoopingSelector>
        </Grid>

The final piece of the puzzle is the wire up, you maybe thinking why can’t you remove the looping selectors that you don’t want ? Well I thought that same thing, however its does not seem possible as the LoopingSelector wants 3 parts to be initialised; a Primary Part / Selector; a Secondary Part / Selector; and a Tertiary Part / Selector. Therefore we have to define all of the selectors in the Xaml. Now that we have that worked out we need to bring over some of the methods from the codebehind the picker from the toolkit.

Initialisation code

public MonthYearPicker()
        {
            this.InitializeComponent();
            this.PrimarySelector.DataSource = new YearDataSource();
            this.SecondarySelector.DataSource = new MonthDataSource();
            this.TertiarySelector.DataSource = new DayDataSource();

            ((DataSource)this.PrimarySelector.DataSource).AltSelectionChanged += this.HandleAltDataSourceSelectionChanged;
            ((DataSource)this.SecondarySelector.DataSource).AltSelectionChanged += this.HandleAltDataSourceSelectionChanged;
            ((DataSource)this.TertiarySelector.DataSource).AltSelectionChanged += this.HandleAltDataSourceSelectionChanged;

            this.InitializeDateTimePickerPage(this.PrimarySelector, this.SecondarySelector, this.TertiarySelector);
        }

Composition of the parts for the picker

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets a sequence of LoopingSelector parts ordered according to culture string for date/time formatting.
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns>
        /// LoopingSelectors ordered by culture-specific priority.
        /// </returns>
        protected override IEnumerable<LoopingSelector> GetSelectorsOrderedByCulturePattern()
        {
            return GetSelectorsOrderedByCulturePattern(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern.ToUpperInvariant(), new char[] { 'Y', 'M', 'D' }, new LoopingSelector[] { this.PrimarySelector, this.SecondarySelector, this.TertiarySelector });
        }

Handles the alt data source selection changed.

        /// <summary>
        /// Handles the alt data source selection changed.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="sender">The sender.</param>
        /// <param name="e">The <see cref="System.Windows.Controls.SelectionChangedEventArgs"/> instance containing the event data.</param>
        private void HandleAltDataSourceSelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
        {
            DataSource source = (DataSource)sender;
            if (source is YearDataSource)
            {
                // Set the year part of the value
                this.PrimarySelector.DataSource.SelectedItem = source.SelectedItem;
                if (source.SelectedItem != null && this.Value.HasValue)
                {
                    this.Value = new DateTime(
                        ((DateTimeWrapper)source.SelectedItem).DateTime.Year, this.Value.Value.Month, 1);
                }
            }
            else if (source is MonthDataSource)
            {
                // Set the month part of the value
                this.SecondarySelector.DataSource.SelectedItem = source.SelectedItem;
                if (source.SelectedItem != null && this.Value.HasValue)
                {
                    // Get the last day of the month
                    this.Value = new DateTime(
                        this.Value.Value.Year, ((DateTimeWrapper)source.SelectedItem).DateTime.Month, 1);
                }
            }
            else if (source is DayDataSource)
            {
                // We don't care about the day
                this.TertiarySelector.DataSource.SelectedItem = source.SelectedItem;
            }
        }

And there we have it DateTime Picker control which you can customised to show the selector that you want to show under different experiences. Our main job has been to refactored some of the code in the toolkit in order to access it from outside and also the changes to the xaml, nothing too taxing. I am pretty certain that this same approach could be used on the Time Picker, I have not tried this however there does not appear to be any particular reasons why this would not be possible.

As always interested in your thoughts and feedback…

What this space for more about the WP7Contrib soon to hit the shelves at a Codeplex near you….

You can download the code from here on Codeplex and take a look at spikes where you can find this sample and others or you can get it from here

Before the import features in Blend appeared we used the cool plug-in from Mike Swanson which would allow us to convert vector art work in Xaml. This was incredibility useful and mean that we reduce the time it took to convert these assets into Xaml and then modifying the Xaml in Kaxaml or in Blend. The process worked for us and we continued down this path until the import features in Blend improved and are now at a state where we can easily use the import functionality in Blend to convert these assets even easier.

But, that is not where the story ends, if you have tried out the import process on complex AI or PS visuals then you will have found that when Blend performs the import it positions each layer into a Canvas and will also import any images into the project as well. All in all this is cool however not so much when you have an existing project where you are happy with the code architecture and the folder structure of your application. And, this is what I want to dig into in this post is how to use the import functionality to your advantage.

Where do we start, ok so lets imagine that you have a project which you have setup or a developer on the team has created, its nicely structured and potentially uses MVVM or even a MVVM framework like MVVM Light. We also have a bunch of great looking designs that we need to convert into Xaml assets. We have a couple of options available at this point; we can import directly into the main solution or we can create a separate project a scratch project where we can import into. Admittedly at first I started out by importing directly into the main solution however this became a headache as the solution becomes polluted, by this I mean that when we do the import Blend will create a new folder in our project to hold the images that are referenced in the AI file however we are more than likely have an images folder in the project where all our images live. And for me this is where the management headache begins as we have to work out which images we want to keep and the ones we want to remove, and we also have to then move these images to the right folder and change the references to these images from the Xaml. All in all not too difficult when we break them down but on a large import this can become rather sticky very quickly.

Because of these issues what I have found is that importing into a scratch project is a smoother process for creating your Xaml assets and managing what images you want to keep. So the process goes something like this.

Create a scratch project and setup the folder structure for your Resource Dictionaries and images to mirror the same structure in the main project. Then import you AI or PS file into this project.

Next start to clean up your imported Xaml, the majority of the time you will want to ungroup the visual elements from their containing canvas as the visual elements will have been relatively positioned to mirror the layout defined in AI or PS. You will also find that the designer will have used a number of different layers to create the final appearance of an element. For example the designer may have used 4 different layers in order to create the colour of an element. In these cases my approach is to use the colour picker in Blend to find out what the colour is of the topmost layer, create this colour as a resource in your Resource Dictionary and then remove all the underlying layers until your left with the topmost then apply your newly created colour resource so that the visual element looks like the original. We could leave the visual elements as is however there are performance issues that we may encounter when doing this, in that if you have a list and you are planning on using this visual a number of times then those hidden layers are going to be present in the visual tree which means that the framework will render these and will have an impact on the performance of the application.

Other items to look out for are drop shadows on elements, when performing the import the drop shadows will be translated in a png images. In the majority of cases removing these images and replacing them with a drop shadow effect is the best mechanism, however there are some cases where the png works better. These situations are related to interaction design and occur when you are either; animating the visual elements on screen from one position to another; or you animating the drop shadow effect itself; in these circumstances then leaving the png is desirable and you may also consider using the EnableGPUAcceleration param at the plugin level along with setting the Bitmap Caching mode on your Xaml element.

By this stage you should now have cleansed your import and are ready to start styling and templating the imported visual elements into controls. There are two options available to you at this stage and they are related to your experience and confidence around the templating of the controls.

The first option is to group up the different visual layers that you want to make into the control, the majority of the time grouping them into a Grid or a  Canvas will work for you. From here you can then right click on the layout panel that you created and select “Make into Control” option where you can select from the popup dialog the control that you want to create a style for. From here you can start to assign the visual elements to the parts associated with that template.

The second option is to drag onto the art board the control that you want to style and template and size the control to be the same as the visual elements. Right click on the control and select the “Create a Copy” sub menu option located under “Edit Template” option. This will then provide you with a default template which you can then start to modify so that it takes on the appearance of the visual.

The first option works well if you have intermit knowledge of the template you are creating, it can also work well when you know that you are creating styles and templates for controls which are of a fixed height and width. However, if this is not the case then the second option is a preferred route.

The styles, templates, colour and brush resources that you are using need to be added into the correct Resource Dictionaries. By following this approach you can then pick up the visual elements and merge them into your main solution along with the modifications to the Resource Dictionaries and moving any images that you are using into your images folder.

I hope this insight helps both designers who are creating assets using Adobe products to think about some best practices on how you construct your designs and for the Blend folks this should help with cleaning up the imported Xaml.

As always please let me know your thoughts and also what you have found works best for you.

The PathListBox ROCKS, if you have not heard of this control before then checkout Christians blog for more details and also his session at mix 10. The PathListBox solves some of the tricky issues related to creating custom panels for a ListBox or ItemsControl. Previously when we need custom layout of visual elements inside of these controls we would typically create a custom Panel and crank C# code and some positioning logic to layout the elements as we needed. However, with the introduction of the PathListBox we nolonger have to resort to building a panel and thus lowers the barrier to entry for designers who want to create custom layouts without having to be reliant on a developer to build the panel.

To get going with the PathListBox I wanted to create an simple Silverlight app which pulled back some results from digg, this is something which I have done in the past to illustrate the basics of MVVM in my session from PDC. While on the topic of MVVM its great to see that we now have an MVVM template inside of Blend that we can use. In this post I am not going to talk about the MVVM templates as I have only started out with them and so to give a comparison would not be justifiable at this stage, but I will posting an article when I have it straighten out in my head.

So for this first adventure I created a new MVVM Silverlight application and added a Model and a Service folder. As we already have the code for the digg service and the model created I copied these classes and moved them into their respective folders in the project. Open up the VM that has been added into the project and we can see that it implements INPC. The other thing to notice is that the constructor in parameter less, which is unlike my VM’s where I would normally inject an interface. So for the purposes of this example i am going to new up the interface inside of the constructor.

Ok so there are 3 steps that we need to perform in order to recreate the radial panel visual layout that is illustrated above. First we need to create our path on the design surface and then add the PathListBox to the design surface and associate the path with the PathListBox. As with a regular ItemsControl or ListBox we need to bind it to a list of items which in this case is our collection of FeedItems. Blend 4 Beta does quite alot of work for free, you will notice it has created the DataTemplate, ItemContainerStyle and ItemPanelTemplate which is rather nice. So here we start our 3 Steps and each step is associated with the templates and style.

First select the DataTemplate of the PathListBox either from the crumb bar or from right clicking in the objects panel. What we need to do here is add a ChangePropertyAction which fires when we LeftMouseButtonDown on to the DataTemplate so that we can set a flag on the data bound object so that it gets removed from the current list and added to second list. Once we have added this we need to change the RotateTransform on the StackPanel to 90.

Navigate back to the PathListBox and this time we want to edit the orientation on the items on the path so that they are OrientToPath and check the Wrap Items checkbox.

The second step is to move into our ItemContainerStyle for the PathListBox and change the VSM states so that we have a nice transition for the items when they are loaded and unloaded. With the release of Blend 4 Beta a new set of states have been added to the ListBoxItem. PathListBoxItem subclasses ListBoxItem and so we have the ability to modify the transitions for the BeforeLoaded and AfterLoaded states. For these I

simply changed the Opacity on the root element so that we can have a simple fade in type transition. Next we need to change the length of the transition in this case to 0.3 seconds, and change the easing function to your desired choice. The other changes I made here was to enable the Fluid Layout and turned on the design time layout transitions so that you can see your transitions during design time. Navigate back to the PathListBox.

The final piece to the puzzle is to change the ItemPanelTemplate. Edit the template either via the assets panel or the crumb bar. Here we are looking to add  the FluidMoveBehavior on to our PathPanel which will be responsible for providing the animation effect for moving items between the two PathListBox’s.

The important things to note here include; we have selected the Children option from the AppliesTo dropdown as we want this particular FluidMoveBehavior to effect all the items in the ListBox; I changed the duration and also the easing functions that I wanted to use; I also selected the DataContext option from the Tag dropdown as I want to capture the data object associated with the item that is being animated. Navigate back to the PathListBox……

And we are done.

3 simple steps for you to add a radial panel layout into your project.

1. Change the data template so that it can handle a user interaction
2. Change the ItemContainerStyle BeforeLoaded and AfterLoaded States
3. Change the ItemPanelTemplate by adding in the FluidMoveBehavior

We also used ChangePropertyAction to manipulate the data in our collections exposed by the VM, and  we  used the FluidMoveBehavior to animate selected items from one PathListBox to another. The ability to do this without having to write any C# is a great step forwards, it does have some consequences but the advantages from my prospective outweigh the disadvantages.

The next thing that I want to do is animate each individual PathListBoxItem depending on where they are on the Path associated with the PathListBox.

All the code for this example you can find on my SkyDrive Folder.

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But this is a POC ? Why would you do this?

Well its an interesting question and I am sure that there are folks out there who like to build prototypes and POC’s in this way, but based on my experience this usually ends up taking longer as you find yourself adding a workaround to the existing workarounds resulting in friction between what you want to do and the limitations of the framework. So the approach that I prefer to use is to take some time out at the start of the process and deconstruct the visual designs and build out a data model to represent what information needs to be presented. We can then go off and create the simple factory classes to build these data structures and take full advantage of the features supported by the framework. In essence we are using the same techniques that we would use for a production quality application but slimming down a journey through the application using more appropriate patterns.

This simple process is not time consuming, helps clear up any potential misunderstanding of how the application will react based on certain interactions, and it means that when deconstructing the visual designs its easy to figure out what type of control you can use in order to build the visual and if the control you are thinking about using will support the interactions required. The additional bonus here is that if you want to go a step further then you easily wire in a simple MVVM pattern, again this is something that I do however its not an essential step.

What I also like about this approach is that POC’s are usually built in a short timeframe and are thus open to change on a regular basis and we need to have an approach which reduces churn. By having a good data model you can limit the pain when things change as you can easily change the data object to suit and then a simple change to the Xaml. The opposite of this can result in lots of conditional logic which becomes prone to bugs and also limiting the application to potentially just a clickable mockup.

The other benefit which results in this approach is the level of reusability that I can pull from the POC and move into the production application. By having taken the time to produce a data structure that is usable this means that I can potentially reuse all the existing data templates, data bindings, styles, templates and certain custom controls. Again from my experience this level of reusability is normally higher than when we push forwards with a more static and tightly coupled approach.

To put this into a better context, a number of Surface applications that I have been involved in recently have required a ScatterView with ScatterView Items as these control provide those all important gestures for NUI interactions out of the box. Cool, but we are faced with the options either; create a known number of items and potentially recreate the same style but with different hardwired data; or create a single data template and style and take advantage of the data bind features. This can easily be achieved by data binding to the DP’s provided by the ScatterView Item that controls its placement, its easy to maintain and manage when those known changes happen. It also provides us with the flexibility to extend certain aspects rapidly without getting freaked out by the amount of conditional logic being added to the app.

My approach here is a simple one, create a base class for all your data controlled visuals which allow you to provide point data information so that when the objects are created you can initialise them where they need to be placed on screen. You can also add into here some more properties such as Orientation and data bind your data object property to the Orientation DP. Properties such as CanScale etc I would manipulate in a Style for the ScatterView Item, however there is no reason why you could not add them into the base. My reasons for the using a Style is so that when I am working with the designer I can easily make changes to the Style when we are both using Blend, it also allows me to share the work with designers visually, this for me is essential, personally I am more of a visual guy I prefer to see something rather than read textual content a visual helps paint the picture in a more accurate way with less room for individual perceptions of a textual instruction or description.

This simple approach provides; the ability to place visual elements exactly where the designer wants them;animations can be built in order to animate these visual elements on and off screen, interrogating the strongly typed data types means that we can apply the required styles on demand; reduces the complexity of app by taking advantage of data binding.

Just to break this down a little further, with the Tag Heuer implementation, I created a bunch of data objects for the locations around the world, London, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Sydney etc; all of which subclass the same base called Location. Location, Travel and Watches, the three different states of the app all subclass a class providing the positioning logic which intern subclasses an abstract base implementing INPC. I then have a data templates for each of the locations that we need to visualise, London, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Sydney etc. The data templates deal nicely with presenting our data, however there is a problem with layout as some of the aforementioned locations need to be positioned from left to right and some need to be positioned from right to left. To achieve this visual effect I used a different style
one for left to right and a second for right to left and wired these into the data template. I could have written c# to flip the visual tree however in this instance it was more effective to rebuild the styles in Blend it also has the advantage that I can show the designer in Blend the visual created and make any additional tweaks required.

I used the same technique for the F1 GP races and the watches area all of which have strongly typed data objects to encapsulate the visual information providing me with the advantages mentioned above to create and adapt quickly with the changes to the visual designs, it also allows me to take advantage of OO when it comes to adding additional properties to the base classes which will have a ripple effect down the object hierarchy.

In your next POC or prototype in WPF I hope that you will feel confident enough to try out this technique and reap the benefits that are at your disposal. Unfortunately the current version of Silverlight does not support implicit data templates, which in my humble opinion is a fundamental missing part of the Silverlight framework. Hopefully we will see this in a future release.

In the next post I am going to dig into how I built the watches section of the application and also dive into how interactions with the watch chrome and its content were created.

This is really the start of a number of posts that I have been meaning to put together for a while now. These are centred around how to rapidly build prototypes. It’s a technique that I use on a regular basis both for WPF and for Silverlight. In order for me to get across how effective this is it seems only right to provide context of how you can also take advantage of this technique.

More about that later, for this particular implementation I partnered with Splendid in order to produce an interactive experience for travellers at London Heathrow T5 lounges. The brief was to help raise brand awareness of the new Tag Heuer watches available and take advantage of the collaborate aspects provided by Surface.

The Tag Heuer Surface application has three main areas of functionality, all driven by the concept of time.

Travel Guide: The application displays the current time at your departure destination, displayed on a Tag Heuer watch display with moving hands. Using a stylized world map passengers can choose popular destinations and explore local time, travel duration and view local landmarks.

Sports Finder: Tag Heuer have a number of sports stars as ambassadors, we chose Lewis Hamilton as the trial location was the UK. Passengers can explore the world find the next Grand Prix including a  countdown and images of last years race.

Watch Explorer: A Tag Heuer Application wouldn’t be quite right without the ability to explore their classic  watch collection, passengers can use gesture to explore high-res images of the men’s and women’s collections with the ability to sign-up for an email on your favourite watch. The email contains details of the watch and your nearest location to purchase.







For a UX developer there are some really rather cool interactions used in each of the areas. I am going to try and give a higher level overview of these areas  below and then jump into the detail in separate posts. The first of these are interactions present in each of the different functional pillars of the experience illustrated above and were designed so that visual elements could be placed into specific areas, animation of these items on and off screen and designed in such away that data bound objects provided the visual positioning information. The solution I used here was a combination of strongly typed data templates with model objects that contained the required coordinates of where to be positioned on screen and styles to create the required interactions.

When deconstructing the visual design I knew that the ScatterView Control would do the job nicely and having the coordinates in the model meant that we can take full advantage of data binding as each ScatterView Item has a centre and orientation DP which can be used to achieve this layout. Using a different ScatterViewItem Style provided the ability to choose different interactions and visuals based on which area of functionality is in use. Note there are 2 styles for the map points; a style for map points which are right aligned and a style for those which are left aligned. Using the strongly typed data templates and the use of data binding provides a clean and easy to achieve solution that provided the required interactions. The application was aware of its state and by changing the data based on state the usage of the strongly typed data templates come into their own as these state changes are triggered resulting in the new visuals to be displayed all done using data and data bindings in the Xaml.

For the travel section animated clocks were used and the TimeZoneInfo class provided the ability  to calculate the time in different time zones. Here I used a dispatch timer that was ticking away and then updating the value of the data object. Each of the different time zones were associated data objects of the current location using data binding and INPC meant that we can change the time in the data object and this will trigger the animations used to rotate the hands on the watch.

The watch section has cool interaction where there is a 2 level zoom mechanism, I broke this one down to be a ScatterViewItem which wraps a ScatterView. This allowed for an interaction which meant the user could  use a pinch gesture in increase the size of the outer ring and then a second pinch gesture can be used to manipulate the watch being displayed. What I like about this interaction design is that it allows the user to easy move and collaborate with other users interested in seeing the detailing of the watch. More importantly this also meant that I could take full advantage of data binding and strongly typed data templates.

As you may have noticed there is an underlying theme happening here, data and Xaml. For me WPF is really all about your data, get the data structure right that needs to be presented on screen and we can take full advantage of the framework and reduce the amount of C# code we write to a minimum.

links

The Moodie Report http://www.moodiereport.com/document.php?c_id=1113&doc_id=23335

From a developer prospective these files can become large very quickly and the result is a complete management headache when it comes to maintaining the styles, control and data templates. Its is also rather easy  to allow this to happen as its in the Xaml and its what the designer produces, in effect its someone else’s responsibility. What is rather interesting and confusing at the same time is that Blend actually works very well when it comes to dealing with resources that are all in one file and it provides the designer with an easy way manage styles and templates. The other interesting thing about RD is that its actually at the heart of the Designer and Developer collaboration, its one of the areas where these two worlds collide. Therefore one of the ways in which we can help improve the workflow is to have a better understanding of RD and create some guidelines on how to best go about structuring them.

Unfortunately, even though RD are one of the core parts that make up the presentation layer there is very little information on best practices on how we should be doing this and why its important to get it right in order from which to have a good platform to move off from. Structuring RD in the wrong way can have rather serious performance problems.

There is a great article on the WPF Disciples pages providing very good advice on how to structure your RD and naming conventions, but I want to attempt to take it a little further. There are a number of different scenarios that I have come across and I am sure that there will be more along the way.  These include; a POC application where this is built quickly and iteratively and requires a compelling UI but there is a high potential the application will not make it into production; themeable applications where a number of different themes can be applied to change the look and feel; and also applications that leverage 3rd party controls which have their own and sometimes rather interesting ways of how they are styled and templated. Each scenario is different but can be solved in the same way by using well structured RD to produce a clean, performant and easy to maintain application.

Ok, so how can we achieve a better structuring of the RD, help improve collaboration and provide a basic pattern and best practices in order to satisfy the different scenarios outlined above ?

Putting your RD in a separate project is the first thing to do, there are a number of advantages in doing this; but primarily this is about separation of concerns to help with workflow; and it helps to provide a blue print of a theme that can be reused over time.

In addition to the guidelines put forwards from the WPF list I am also going to add some more into the mix.

Suggested WPF Disciples Resources :-

BrushResources – solid brushes, linear gradient brushes and drawing brushes

ConverterResources – allows us to reference any of the converters by merging our resource dictionary with this file, rather than re-declaring our converters every time.

ImageResources – as above, allows us to declare an ImageSource once and reference it from anywhere. 

TextResources -styles applied to textual elements (Hyperlinks, TextBlocks, etc.)

Additional Resources:-

Colours – for simple colours used as a swash for branding of clients colour palette.

DataTemplates – holds all the Data Templates used in the application.

Storyboards – holds all the Storyboard animations.

VectorGraphics – holds all the vectors graphics

CustomControls – holds styles and templates for those custom lookless controls

CommonControls- holds styles and templates for those common controls

Now the above list is not an exhaustive one and there is a high potential that this may change in the future but for now these provide a good platform from which to start. There are a number of ways in which you can slice and dice the RD used in your application some of which I will talk about shortly, but in general its best to think about the RD as a whole. The reason for this is that its best to see the Xaml assets as what constitutes your design and interaction of the UI that you are projecting onto the view for the user to experience. Therefore a change in the template or style means a  complete new design. By thinking about them in a more holistic view as a the sum of all parts.

Therefore by splitting up the styles, templates etc into different high level RD categories provides the capabilities for the designers to work in an independent way and not have the constraints of working in the same project as the developers. The majority of times you will want to split out the RD into a separate project, and provide an area where they can create and design controls and elements. It also means that as they are working in a separate project they are completely separated from the developers but they are both working in the same solution.

What are those other views of RD that I mentioned earlier. Another potential way of looking at splitting up the RD is to break out the control templates and styles and place those into separate files. This will provide the ability to change the colours, font types etc and leave the control templates alone, which is great for those situations where you want to restyle the application and want to retain the layout of the controls. However, there are some problems with this approach; making significant changes to the style of controls will almost certainly mean that you will have to change the layout of the control, or building a custom control to handle the different styles; support in Blend for this type of structure is sub optimal in that it becomes more difficult to navigate and manage the styles and templates.

So why is it important to structure the RD in this way ? Why can they live all in the same Generic.Xaml file ? Is it the developer or the designer who owns the files ? How does this make my application more themeable ?

So those are a few of the questions which I have been asked about recently from both designers and developers, and they are all good questions and ones which i have also been thinking about hence my solution attempts to tackle these questions and provide a simpler implementation of how to use RD in your app.

One of the main problems with coming up with a good structure is the lack of guidance that is actually out there, plenty of high level information around some structure and naming conventions but no real information on the details. Rather frustratingly although we have gone head first into solving and building frameworks that address MVVM and come up with some notable solutions. It does feels like we have neglected an important area of the presentation layer.

What is rather interesting is how differently developers and designers perceive RD and this comes out in how they implement them in the app.

Developer : As a developer it is a natural and in the interest of best practices to split out each individual control so that each control is sat in its own RD.

Designer: As a designer its natural to think of all the controls at a higher level so that at set of individual controls contribute to the overall design of the app.

So as you can see neither side is right or wrong its their interpretation of RD which differs and this is natural as the different roles have different views and priorities on what is required to build the User Experience. What is interesting as well is that these opinions are skewed by the tools that they use and how they interpret and solve problems. The developer is very much focused on detail and implementation, mean while the designer is more interested in the higher level and the total experience of their design.

Therefore a combination of both these views seems to feel right where we split up the RD into a higher level categorisation with good naming conventions. This approach meets both parties needs and is Blendable allowing the designer to work in an environment which has a reduced reliance on the developer world and vice versa.

So I am hoping this that has made you think a little more about RD. In the next post I am going to talk more about how to implement the RD in your application and drill into the performance issues related to implementing RD and some sample code to help with guidance.

As promised I have stashed all the final code examples up on my skydrive folder so that you can download and play with the samples. As we ran out of time in the last session what I will do in the next week or so is to record a Camtasia session and capture what I unfortunately did not get time to go over during the session.

I have named the zip files as intuitively as possible so these line up with the title of the session.

What I also wanted to briefly mention is that in the MEF and Ninject demos you will see that I am using Commands from the Silverlight Extensions project on CodePlex. The command pattern that is used here is a standard command pattern common to WPF. In the current release there is no support for Commands so what you will see included in the projects are the Command classes that I need in order to harness the power of Commands.

In a previous life I wrote a post on WPF commands that you may want to take a look at if you are not familiar to the Command pattern used in WPF and how it helps to separate out UI logic into you View Model and helps increase the testability of your code that responds to the behaviours in your application. The refactor that I did here was to remove the click event handler on the button and replace this with a command. There are 3 steps for refactoring out the event handler.

First we need to create a commands.cs file and create a Commands class which will hold all our commands associated with our view model. In essence we are going to be providing a list of possible actions that the View Model can perform in relation to the view. Once we have created the class we need to define our commands that we want which in our demo is called RefreshFeedItems then we need to add in public mechanism so that we can invoke the command from the view so that it can be wired up to a button.

using StandardViewModel.SLExtensions.Input;

public class Commands
{
      private static readonly Command refreshFeeds = new Command(RefreshFeedItems);

      public static Command RefreshFeedItems

      { get { return refreshFeeds; } } }

Now that we have defined the command that we want to fire we need to do the second part which is to wire up the command in the Xaml of the view.

     Input:CommandService.Command=RefreshFeedItems

     <Button Content=Refresh
                    Grid.Column=2
                    Margin="3,3,3,3"
                    IsEnabled="{Binding IsRefreshEnabled}"
                    Input:CommandService.Command="RefreshFeedItems" />

We can now remove the click handler code behind of the view.

The finally part is to implement the CanExecute and Executed code in the ViewModel, so move into the Constructor of the ViewModel and here wire up the commands.

       Commands.RefreshFeedItems.CanExecute += (sender, args) args.CanExecute = true;
       Commands.RefreshFeedItems.Executed += delegate(object sender, ExecutedEventArgs args)
         {
                        Refresh();
         };

And we are done. Enjoy. One thing to note is that there are other types of commands, RelayCommand and DelegateCommand which are also very cool black belt ninja moves for dealing with separation when building your MVVM apps