Greetings … long time no read, I have been rather inactive for a long time now. Apologies for that, but I have been extremely busy with holding presentations and trainings around Expression and Silverlight.
And this is the reason for this post: this post is about a complete WPF Training Hands On Lab. It contains instructions for designing and building a working WPF desktop application with the following features:
- Dynamic XML data binding and data filtering
- UI Styling with data and control templates
- Triggers, events and animation
Download the lab manual here: Expression Blend End-to-End exercise manual. The assets (images and code files) can be found here. All the images used in this application are in the public domain or have been taken by me. Descriptions and art details come from Wikipedia.
This hands on lab is based on the incredible work of two of my colleagues at Microsoft – Celso Gomes and Kirupa Chinnathambi. They held a great presentation at MIX 08 called Applications = Designers and Developers where they went through the steps required to design and build such a working application from scratch. I have learned a lot of my WPF knowledge from this talk so I decided to create this hands on lab which has been modified from the original to only use the Expression tools and no code at all. (I am not a developer, so I wanted to only use Expression tools). Also, I wanted to tell a bit of a story around the demo to be able to include a bit of background info on XAML and Microsoft’s UX story.
If you want to see the presentation I usually do together with the demo, you can download the PPT here: The World of Expression.
You can access the video of Celso’s and Kirupa’s talk at http://sessions.visitmix.com. Watching this is highly recommended! And, if you want to know how to access SQL data from your WPF application, they are describing in detail how to do that using some code snippets. In general, the process and steps used in the lab manual to design this application are taken straight from this talk … they have made it so clear and easy it was like a revelation for me :-).
Cheers
Michael
Filed under: Tutorials |
Design | Geek 
[…] step-by-step way of getting to grips with Expression Blend and realising the power of the tool. Visit Michael’s blog “Design Geek” for assets and script. TagsDeep Zoom Expression Blend Expression Studio Flash IconWorkshop […]