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Last year I created and uploaded a demonstration project to Popfly that converted a Word 2007 Document to a WPF FlowDocument. The best example of a FlowDocument can be seen in the New York Times Reader , an instance of Syndicated Client Starter...( Read More...
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Next week I will be in New York City meeting customers and I will be holding a free half-day mini-workshop at the Microsoft office on 6th Avenue to teach people about building Silverlight and WPF applications with Expression Studio and Visual Studio. ...( Read More...
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I love using Expression Blend. With both a design education (architecture) and a career in software development, I've become somewhat of an expert on using Microsoft's Expression Blend for designing WPF and Silverlight user experiences. Over...( Read More...
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I have been using a Lenovo T60p computer with Windows Vista since I joined Microsoft last year. Lenovo has a great System update utility that keeps the service packs and applets up to date. Recently the update utility installed a new version...( Read More...
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I just posted the recording of the webinar that I did today showing a Word 2007 Add-in that creates WPF Flow Documents (using the FlowDocument class): https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/view?id=74SMQS Here's an example of where I've used it to...( Read More...
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One of the challenges with creating online documentation is readability, especially with long documents. Most of the time, we end up printing out documents instead of attempting to read them online. One we print them out we lose the ability to easily search for text, one of the great aspects of online documents. Creating a great online reading experience was one of the major goals with the WPF FlowDocument, a XAML element that can put into any WPF application as well as being natively hosted by Internet Explorer. To see an example of a FlowDocument, take a look at a whitepaper that I recently wrote on Silverlight and Web Analytics.
In their most basic form, FlowDocuments are XAML markup, similar in form to XHTML documents. In addition to HTML, FlowDocuments add automatic column flow, search, scaling, readability enhancements, and hyphenation. Indeed it would be conceivable to transform XHTML to FlowDocuments using XSLT, because both formats are XML. I started looking around and I couldn't find any tools for creating FlowDocuments, especially with the authoring tool that I use (in addition to Windows Live Writer), Microsoft Word. Wait! Can't I just transform the Word Open XML into the FlowDocument XAML using XSLT? I sure can. In a few hours, I built a sample Word 2007 Ribbon Add-in that transforms the Word Open XML (WordML) of any Word 2007 document into the FlowDocument XAML. I will be sharing the source code for this Office Business Application (OBA) solution as well.
On November 29th at 11:00 AM PDT, I will be presenting in a live Webinar on how I built this solution with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2(Orcas). Here's what I'll cover:
- Show how to use Visual Studio 2008 to create Office 2007 (and 2003) Add-ins.
- Show how to use the new visual Ribbon Designer in Visual Studio 2008 to craft a ribbon interface for Word
- Show how to to use WPF windows within a Word 2007 Add-in
- Walk through the transformation code
- Demonstrate the FlowDocument format
If you are interested in coming to the webinar (it will be recorded if you cannot make it) please register here.
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Back in July, I created a simple grid of when to use which Microsoft presentation technology. I did this in response to a workshop I ran at one of my customer's offices. David Chappell just wrote a whitepaper, Introducing WPF explaining WPF and as part of it he also explains when to use which presentation technology, but in much more detail.
Having taken the journey from MFC to WinForms to Silverlight to WPF, I really understand how confusing it can be, especially as you are planning products over the long term. If you care about building great user experiences, please download and read the whitepaper so you can understand the continuum of tools and technologies to support you.
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Four guys out of Bulgaria just built this .Net application for mind mapping. It looks really cool with a very fresh look! It was built with WPF and all our latest technology like Silverlight. I can't wait to try it out when it goes beta on November 1st. What amazing things could happen if Mindjet would hire these guys? What if another company were to hire them?
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Yesterday I was visiting an IT department of a media company that was developing internal applications for their internal network users. They asked a great question about when to use which presentation technologies, now that Microsoft has WPF, WPF XBAP, Silverlight, and ASP.Net+AJAX. Here is my comparison matrix:
| WPF | WPF XBAP | Silverlight | ASP.Net + AJAX |
| Client | Windows XP SP2 & Vista | Internet Explorer + Windows XP SP2 & Vista | FireFox, Mac Safari, Internet Explorer | Any Web Browser |
| Deployment | Downloadable Installer or ClickOnce | Runs in Internet Explorer secure sandbox | One-time install of Silverlight plug-in | Web Page |
| When to use | Programs that need access to Windows desktop files. | Intranet applications for Windows-oriented companies. | Rich Internet Applications for public-facing web sites | General-purpose public-facing web sites |
Are there any other factors that should be in this matrix?
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I was having dinner with a friend yesterday (non-Microsoft) who manages a software development team and he told me that he was excited about the potential of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Expression Blend for his company's products. With that excitement also came some questions about how he could integrate the designer/developer workflow that Blend supports into his existing team. For him, it was clear how the interaction designers would use Blend to create XAML that would then be wired up to business logic by the software developers. What wasn't clear was the workflow further down in the development process once bugs and enhancement requests are then submitted against the code in development. Would the interaction designer then be responsible for fixing bugs and making changes in the XAML?
I answered him that in the short term the developer would use Blend in conjunction with Visual Studio. In my opinion, the interaction designer would probably not be involved in minor maintenance and bug fixing for the XAML, only major interaction changes. Because developers would get Expression Blend as part of their MSDN Premium subscription, they could use Blend to do visual XAML editing. Another option is to use Visual Studio 2005 which does have a XAML visual editor as a free download, part of the .Net 3.0 Extensions, but it is not as robust as Expression Blend. The upcoming version of Visual Studio, codename Orcas, will have a much more fully functional visual XAML editor for WPF.
Now that Microsoft finally has tools and technology that separate interaction design from code development, I think that we're going to see many companies reexamining and changing how their software development teams work to build better user experiences. Putting that in context with yesterday's release of the iPhone, we really see that great user interaction does matter. I see the increased importance and legitimacy of this very important role in information technology, so half-way through 2007, I would like to name this year:
2007: The Year of the Interaction Designer
Let's see if it sticks!
