Overview of Sample Data in Blend 3

One of my favorite, if not my favorite, feature of Blend 3 is Sample data.

Choosing Colors to Complement Your User Interface with Expression Design

Learn more about how to choose the right colors for your user interface. In this video from the Principles of Design Series by Arturo Toledo, you will learn a few techniques to pick colors that work well with each other. Choosing the right colors for…( read more )

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Choosing Colors to Complement Your User Interface with Expression Design

Learning to Create Icons using Expression Design

In this video, part of the Principles of Design Series, Arturo Toledo, demonstrates the basics of designing icons. Icons are a way to abstract a real visual object into a usually smaller representation that preserves the essence of the original object…( read more )

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Learning to Create Icons using Expression Design

Principles of Design Series: Creating Mosaic and Tiled Patterns using Expression Design

In this video, one of many in the Principles of Design Series, Arturo Toledo, shows how to create patterns (mosaic, tiles) with Expression Design. Watch and discover how easy it is to create your own patterns in Expression Design so you can then reuse…( read more )

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Principles of Design Series: Creating Mosaic and Tiled Patterns using Expression Design

Principles of Design Series: Learning about Rhythm using Expression Design

This is the 2nd of 13 in the Expression “Principles of Design Series” created by Arturo Toledo of the Microsoft Expression team. In this video, Arturo talks about “Rhythm”, a principle of design that helps you define visual patterns that people will read…( read more )

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Principles of Design Series: Learning about Rhythm using Expression Design

Silverlight Revives Playboy, Rolling Stone Archives

Silverlight is bringing magazine memories back to life through Bondi Digital Publishing’s Cover to Cover . Starting with classic issues of Playboy and Rolling Stone , Cover to Cover features stunning quality and lets you browse and search decades of content…( read more )

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Silverlight Revives Playboy, Rolling Stone Archives

Atlanta Web Design Group – May 27, 2009

Some house keeping because this post has been in my Live Writer for the past week…On May 27th I had the pleasure to present a MIX 2009 recap to the Atlanta Web Design Group along with Glen Gordon and Dennis Estanislao .

Blend Artboard Exceptions and Loaded Event

It can be frustrating when you are coding along in Silverlight, and you open up a UserControl in Blend only to see something like the following:

An Exception was thrown.

InvalidOperationException: HtmlPage_NotEnabled StackTrace InnerException: None

This is often caused by a UserControl that has a Loaded event with some code that isn””t happy inside Blend”’’s artboard.

That”’’s right - when you preview a UserControl inside Blend, the Loaded event for the control actually fires, and code in that handler is executed!

You may have noticed this when you place a StoryBoard.Begin() call in the Loaded event, Blend will actually show the animation on the artboard. So how do we workaround these exceptions? First, expand the StackTrace arrow, and you””ll get some more details. In this case, we can see that the Loaded event for a UserControl named “ucResults” is the culprit: Now that we know which Loaded event is causing the issue, take a look at the code and see what is going on.

In this case, the code is accessing the HtmlPage class - which would not be available to Blend when it hosts the control on the artboard:

private void UserControl_Loaded( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {

// Did the QueryString contain an Email address?

if ( HtmlPage .Document.QueryString.Keys.Contains( “Email” ) )
{

txtEmailTo.Text = HtmlPage .Document.QueryString[ "Email" ].ToString();

}

Luckily, there is a special class, System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties , which allows us to check at runtime whether we are in Design Mode or not. We can just add a check on this, and if we are in Design Mode, we get out of the Loaded event handler:

private void UserControl_Loaded( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {

if ( DesignerProperties .GetIsInDesignMode( this ))

return ;

// Did the QueryString contain an Email address?

if ( HtmlPage .Document.QueryString.Keys.Contains( “Email” ) )

txtEmailTo.Text = HtmlPage .Document.QueryString[ "Email" ].ToString();

}

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Blend Artboard Exceptions and Loaded Event

Visual WebGui Releases the First Coding Free Point and Click Web Design Tool

Available in the new 6.4 Free Preview Version Gizmox have recently released a Free preview edition of Visual WebGui 6.4 allowing users to create rich, customized, and creative web AJAX user interfaces (UI’s) without any need to code in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, or XAML with Silverlight. The Point & Click Web Design Tool is a ground breaking approach to simple, intuitive developer/designer interface. Below the press release : Gizmox the provider of the Visual WebGui (VWG) rich inte

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Visual WebGui Releases the First Coding Free Point and Click Web Design Tool

Dew Drop - May 29, 2009

  Design / Methodology / Testing Using Gallio with NCover (Andre Loker) Lifecycle of an open source project (Chad Myers) Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices – Monster Objects (Chris Missal) Pex 0.13 Released: Unit Tests as Inputs, Fuzzing and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, F# Beta 1 support (Nikolai Tillman) Taming the Pex beast: Well-behaved enums, multi-dimensional arrays and booleans (Jonathan de Halleux) Coding Dojo #16: Reading SUnit code (Mark Needham) Integration v

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Dew Drop - May 29, 2009