Silverlight. Day 4.

I found a great tutorial

Free Training for Microsoft^® Silverlight™ 2

from AppDev for FREE. Very interesting.

I hope this can give some more light for Silverlight ;)

Silverlight. Day 3.

I´m still watching videos to understand more about how to develop a Silverlight app, and in the part 3 of the Blend tutorial by Jesse Liberty there's a step where you apply a style to the button of the chat prototype where the cut & paste really makes me question the UI development.

First, as always that you want some "special shape" button, you need to define the view of its states (generally 3). But why do you need to specify this templates in Visual Studio manually? Why not to apply some Power Point wisdom and have a pallete of predefined shapes to choose from. And if you know about button states, why not have some configuration panel in Blend for this? if you have a UI dedicated tool, let's charge it!

The one great things that I found is this ObservableCollection that works with generics, that can be consumed by a control in a MVC way. That is cool!

Silverlight. Day 2.

After the innitial trauma, I decided to read and check some tutorials to understand what is happening with Silverlight.

First of all. Why a new tool for GUI design instead of having it integrated to VS, as usual? Well, after watching the video tutorials related to Blend, its clear that VS UI editor is limited; we have use it just to size forms and put controls on them. But when the clients want some color, and shapes and gradients, etc, the effort to do this with the usual controls is too much.

One aproach is to develop or use a UI framework (thinking in reuse), with controls that have cappabilities to look better. However, the look and feel of these controls are not always the best.

This is where Blend fits OK. This Flashy editor lets you modify and edit almost any visual feature of the controols, and best of all, the specification is made in XML language, in this case XAML.

To have all these features in the standard IDE is too much and usability of VS could be affected. Nice thing is that the same files are used by VS and Blend, so no import utilities are needed.

Now I'm going to try the installation to get my hands dirty ;)

Silverlight. Day 1.

"What the hell is this? Where are the controls? What is this mess inside the project?"

These are my first impressions after I open a friend's example (first thing I saw was a XAML file, then some code, and then some messages about trials), without reading no tutorials or going to therapy, to prepare myself with this 2008 shock. I had the same sensation that I experienced 10 years ago when I wanted to do some UI stuff with Java; no IDE, just some third party tools or code it by hand. Blindness.

My pal told me: "You make the UI with expression Blend".

But why do you need a special tool to manage XML UI definitions? There's no more IDE. This is a MDE (Messy Development Environment).

The apology is based in roles. The designer need something to design and the developer someting to code. But when you make some desktop app you have controls, or a web app you have more controls, why with Silverlight you ain´t have nothing?

(I suddenly remember this song: Two steps behind - Def Leppard)

Now I understand why in the last 3 MS events where they showed this things I felt very upset and confused.

After this non pleasant experience, I believe Flex is a much better platform to make RIAs. No doubt about it.

Programming everywhere with anyone

No more need to carry your Server or desktop PC on your back, and your CTR monitor on a second round. Laps & wi-fi let us move; giving us the chance of freedom.

But what about your dev tools? Do you still need to coordinate with your partner to "sync" the code you finish at midnight, just to find out some last minute extra errors?

Can we develop "socially"?

Here are some tools, platforms and services that promise the next dev paradigm. But then, how the work relations are going to be managed? even overseas?

IBM/Rational Jazz
http://jazz.net/pub/index.jsp

codstorm
http://www.codstorm.com/

codeBeamer
http://www.intland.com/

CodeX
http://codex.xrce.xerox.com/en/index.php

SalesForce
http://www.salesforce.com/developer/

http://www.collab.net/

Web X

It seems that someone applied the version control idea to the web, with the intention of remarking the differences between the read-only Web and the interactive Web we are dealing with today.

1.0 is the mark for the static content, dotcom dissaster and the raise of internet development.

2.0 is not just blogs, on-line video, wikis, and even more. 2.0 is the awaken of the open collective efforts and their results. Maybe hundreds of projects died in the way, but the important thing is that the new ones learned from the fallen.

3.0 maybe the Web in 3D, a semantic effort, or an omni functional platform. Who knows it? The point is that individuals and companies are investing lots of time innovating. So 3.0 may not have a unique characteristic, but many.

And what about when we reach the Web 10.0; or as Apple states, X?

Graphic design for engineers and mortals

One of the main factors that people want today from a software product is that it must look good.

Fancy curved interfaces with gradient fills and nice colors are IN, but how do they do it? and most important, how can we do it?

Fortunally design guidelines and theories give us a clue of how this artisits do their tricks.

But there is still something missing. Why do I need to learn HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, and many many more dialects for make some text and images look good?

My proposal is graphic and web design for mortals. It´s possible to make editing tools that focus on information and the layout, instead of implementation details.

A first step in this direction was CSS Playground (now published at planetsourcecode.com), a program I made for my multimedia students to show them some things about CSS. But from this prototipe, I really believe that a tool that focus on Information Architecture has more future that another WYSIWYG script editor.