- Posted by christhi on November 19, 2008
If you want to pick apart Expression Blend and see how it was built but don't have the source code here is a great "SPY-like" utility for Expression Blend you can download. You can spy on each control in blend and even get visuals of each component in 2D as well as 3D below ...
http://www.blois.us/Snoop/
- Posted by christhi on November 19, 2008
Many of those who have programmed WPF or SilverLight applications are well aware that Microsoft Expression Blend was written in WPF so that may be old news. However one thing I thought was cool and worth sharing was the fact the Blend 2 SP1 product itself was used to design the Blend itself. Now that also may have been assumed but it is great realization that Blend is plainly capable of handling large projects. Fun Fact: Blend SP1 alone has 300,000 lines of C# and 80,000 lines of XAML all editable in Blend 2 SP1. I've been talking about that for some time now but what I haven't seen was a demo on the editing of the actual Blend 2 source code until now. If you were at PDC 2008 you may have caught this session but for those unfortunate souls who couldn't justify the journay to their managers you can now see if online at:
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC47/
Notice how fast the project loads.. not bad.
- Posted by christhi on November 18, 2008
Although I can't talk about much what I can say about SilverLight 3 is that it will be next year and will include the following:
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Major media enhancements (including H.264 video support)
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Major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration)
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Major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls).
Next year Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express will also support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight, and add tool support for data-binding. The most interesting by far is 3D support and until now was a tool discussion since supporting 3D really meant at the ability to easily design 3D-like solutions using a 2D space leveraging transforms as an example. This is possible today with SilverLight with libraries such as Kit3D at http://www.codeplex.com/Kit3D but it is not integrated into the Expression toolset so developers will still need to roll up there sleeves a bit.
More to come on future posts....
- Posted by christhi on November 6, 2008
Here is a new deck I put together on the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 -- This is geared for developers but anyone interested in the new functionality of IE8 will get some value.
http://www.slideshare.net/christhi/internet-explorer-8-for-developers-presentation
if this link fails you can view all of my decks at:
http://www.slideshare.net/christhi