User Experience Design : Blend

Silverlight Resize Drag Behavior for targeted UIElements

Andries van der Meulen — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:19:02 GMT

I have been searching for a Silverlight behavior where you have the ability to resize a column. Normally you can do such a thing with a GridSplitter onto a grid with several columns.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work when you also wants to implement something like a hide and show menu column.

Therefore I created this behavior myself and released it on CodePlex. So if you are developing a Silverlight application and you find yourself in need of a simple behavior that allows you to resize an element by dragging either in height or width, go to the ResizeDragBehavior on Codeplex.

The solution also includes a sample project where you can see how you can easily setup a menupanel-based interface.

The behavior is fully compatible with Expression Blend.

Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

Andries van der Meulen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:26:34 GMT

Last Friday I was at the SDN Event in Houten, where I followed several UX tracks, and spoke with the speakers afterwards. I was trying to find out how they worked with Designers and Developers and the technique’s Silverlight and WPF.

And almost everybody agreed (except Kevin McNeish for some reason) on how to let these two groups cooperate. You will need someone called an Integrator. Somebody who can merge the work of the designer with the work of the developer.

Expression Blend is not a tool for Designers. Maybe Microsoft would really like the idea that Designers would work with it, but you cannot really design in it.

You probably can educate your Designers to let them work in Blend, but personally I think that’s rather strange. Because with Microsoft’s Philosophy about “People Ready” and “User-centered design” where the application is adjusted to the person’s specific needs. This one doesn’t seem to fit in. It looks like they’ve created a new role within the development process.

So how do you need to work with a “Integrator”.

Well, it really depends on how much your designers are willing to “bend” towards the tasks of an Integrator. If they only make the design as pictures, then the Integrator must build the entire interface in XAML.

I also may be possible that a Designer (or someone else) can do the work of a Front-end developer, and build the interface architecture in Blend. The Integrator will then connect it to the work of the Developer.

With the interface architecture ready (build by either a Front-end developer or the Integrator), and you have “learned” Designers how to Style the different elements in the interface, then they can do this styling themselves right inside Blend. But you do need to teach them how to work with the different styling types, bindings, resources, etc.

Luckily most difficulties are with integrating the Design. Development on the other hand is a bit more straightforward and can be applied through patterns as MVVM. This article by Josh Smith in the February 2009 issue of the MSDN magazine explains how you can work with this.

Conclusion: When working with Silverlight or WPF, and have both Designers and Developers, make sure to get yourself an Integrator (or someone who can fill in that role). Having a naming-convention like I explained in this post will just not work in this scenario, because you cannot expect Designers to be able to build the entire interface in Blend themselves.

Designers & Developers within the ALM / TFS vision.

Andries van der Meulen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:17:54 GMT

What Wikipedia says about ALM:

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.

Like most people know, Microsoft supports this with their Team Foundation system.

This is very cool and keeps getting better and better. And with the introduction of Blend 3 (The tool for creating interfaces & prototypes in WPF or Silverlight) Microsoft is extending this towards application design. And this progress is where I have a special interest in.

TFS supports different roles within their ALM vision. Project Managers, Testers, Architects, Developers, etc… There have been very much attention towards specializing the tooling towards the specific needs of the roles within ALM. And now they’ve added Blend to this.

I am currently spending a lot of time trying to integrate User Experience Design in this ALM vision, with primarily using Microsoft technology. And yet I still haven’t figured out how exactly Blend fits in the process. I mean, it’s a really great tool, and I do like to work with it, but when you look at how it must fit within your development process, it’s hard to tell where to place it.

I know for a fact that a lot of Designers aren’t really enthusiastic about it. Why is that? Because you can’t really design in it. Microsoft knows this and that’s why they created the Photoshop and Illustrator import in Blend 3. I also know that Developers try to avoid using Blend, because they like to prevent a tool that will alter their code, markups or projects.

So that means to me that there are only two roles possibly using Blend. Interaction Designers and/or Integrators. And now I am wondering if this is actually part a of ALM. And does it need to be a part of it. How do you work together as designers and developers. And how do you do this with TFS, using Blend.

I’ve seen some great ideas, but every project so far (including projects within Microsoft) does it their own way. There is no real thought on how to work together.

Maybe it’s time to refine all these technologies, patterns and project guidance's and set up a good way for letting the User Experience part collaborate within the Application Lifecycle Management.

I’ll get back on this.

Blend 3

Andries van der Meulen — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:17:49 GMT

Most people probably already know that Microsoft's MIX09 event took place last week. Because I am specialized in Microsoft development, this event has introduced a lot of interesting new stuff.

But because there are so many people already blogging about the new releases and new developments, that I think it is really not necessary for me to start writing about it. For those interested I have a little link-list here about some of this published information:

The most interested I’ve seen so far is the new release of Blend. In this version there will be a great support of prototyping. This goes by the name of sketch flow and a session-video about this can be watched here. This with (finally) the integrated support for Team System, will be a great way for quickly creating impressions of the application within the ALM vision.

For all the new features in Blend 3 I want to redirect you to the following posts:

For our Dutch readers, Martin Tirion of Microsoft Netherlands has got some nice highlights posts about the MIX event: