Coreys|Portfolio.com

It's been a while but more content is coming

Corey — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:14:00 -0700

I have been taking a break from speaking and blogging over the summer to spend more time with my wife and children. I have just been overrun with to-do's, honey-do's, and alot of new Ux, WPF, and Silverlight work at Magenic. But, I have not been doing nothing with my spare time, I have been privately busy on a personal project that I am excited about announcing in the next week or so. I will be releasing a website that will have video training for the developer minded and a seperate section for the design minded individuals who want to learn Silverlight 3. I will provide more details when this is launched. I am also going to put more effort in supporting some other sites... including www.silverlightshow.com, I believe the people who work with that site share the same goals that I do with wanting to spread the tricks of the trade of Silverlight and Rich Internet Applications with a like minded community.

As a second note, I have a huge list of Silverlight topics to start blogging about. With the release of Silverlight 3 I have alot of work to do and alot of information I can't wait to share with everyone that I have learned through my Silverlight 3 development lately. So with that said, stay tuned as more content will be coming.

Finally, there is some new website skinning coming. I have also created some new url's to find me... so now you can also get to my blog from http://www.xamlmammal.com and http://www.silverlight-blogger.com. The only thing left is to return to twitter... though I haven't exactly convinced myself that twitter is worth the time poured into it. I find it to be terribly distracting to constantly be monitoring twitter with my other communication vices. I can't promise anything but I will atleast use it as an announcement tool in the future so follow me at xamlmammal.

Riapalooza and Twin Cities Code Camp content

Corey — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:38:00 -0700

So I am breaking blog silence today, its been a while since I have posted anything, I have been knee deep in lots of different efforts and I made multiple promises of getting my content out to everyone. So I will start with my content from Riapalooza as well as the same content for Twin Cities Code Camp, the turn out to both was awesome and the response from everyone was even better. I am glad this talk seems to be taken in by both developers and designers alike and I was honored to have been abled to bring it to a code camp even without its direct nature to real "code". Anyways as promised here is the slide deck:

BetterApps.pptx (4.31 mb) (uses Microsoft Power Point 2007 and you can use Power Point Viewer which is free)

Some Links I used in my talk:

Awesome Persona Resource Collection: http://deyalexander.com/resources/uxd/personas.html
Quince, Infragistics UX Pattern browser: http://quince.infragistics.com

For those of you waiting/looking for "Mix It Up" tour bits from that talk, I will be prepping that content to share Tuesday following my Fort Wayne presentation (May 12th).

Fantastic, Friday Fun with "My Brute"

Corey — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:12:00 -0700

So I was introduced to the latest internet craze, it would seem across the internets is the spread of a crazy game called "My Brute". Its ultimately about building a community and I havent exactly figured out what the trick is to the game. I know, I know, I may be missing the point somewheres. Its very much a social networking triangle, and if you want to check it out I of course encourage you to go here: http://xamlmammal.mybrute.com and just very quickly create a guy and fight.

Its funny, I wont lie to you, the game is geared around spamming the world with your own personal link and getting as many people to create guys with your link. I ask you to check it out because I want to see where the game goes in the short term. OK OK I really want to beat up my co-workers but is there anything wrong with that?

The game and interface itself seems somewhat simple, you do nothing but manage the fight system itself and watch. And like twitter, it makes no sense to you sit down and watch yourself get sucked in. Happy Friday.

SilverlightShow announces "Shared Experience" Initiative

Corey — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:57:00 -0700

SilverlightShow.net, an online community for providing a plethora of information, tools, and tutorials regarding Microsoft Silverlight, has announced a new initiative around "shared experience". Think of it as a program for those of us who have real world experience in implementing real business solutions with Silverlight as an outlet to share those experiences with you. If your interested in how silverlight could be leveraged with your company or considering using it with your business solutions this is a great place to see how others are using Silverlight and learn their experiences with it.

If you are someone who has integrated Silverlight in your environment and want to participate in this program, check out this page for more details.

The first person to participate in this cool program is David Kelley from Identity Mine and you can read his white paper here. If you have heard me talk on Silverlight, you probably heard me mention SilverlightShow.net, its a great website trying to build an international community around Silverlight, so I encourage you to check them out.

What happens at Mix, gets exposed to everyone

Corey — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:21:00 -0700

Day 1

Day 1 of mix was awesome, it started off with the retrieval of a goody bag from registration that had an impressive amount of free stuff... A really cool notebook, a KEXP cd which housed alot of local bands from Seattle, all of which I had never heard of but the music wasn't bad at all. The sharepoint and IE8 cups were nice, 4GB USB drive, a copy of WIndows Server 2008 Web Edition, and my personal favorite a copy of Bill Buxton's book. Definately way better than last year's free stuff, which was so awesome I dont remember any of it. My only complaint was the bag's seem to get worse year after year. Luckily I ran into Rob Zelt and Rachel Appel at a critical discussion where Rob announced he had a few extra Tech Ed backpacks that I am hoping to walk away with.

Day 1 continued with a keynote gathering with Bill Buxton evangelizing user experience. It was interesting, the one thing I couldn't help but notice that he really set up the ball for the later announcement of the sketch flow, the setup was almost comical for someone who already knew about the awesome new feature. Scott Guthrie came out with a bang, his video really setup the mood and it helped provide more character to his personality. Scott Guthrie's keynote came off with great success... his announcments were taken in with applause and it was a great start off to the rest of the day. The only downside is, I will totally be focused on if he is wearing a red shirt everytime I see him now.

The tone at day 1 was filled with alot of excitement around Silverlight 3, Blend, and to my surprise, even Expression Web with the new feature of "Super Preview". A name of which I hope sticks in the final release. And I look forward to the next generation which has to be called "Super Duper Preview. Now I had seen alot of the features at the MVP Summit, of which I was not allowed to talk about. So most of it was old hat, but what wasn't old news was the details of the Silverlight Out of Browser experience, while it has some work to be done, it definately has some amazing potential. The enthusiasm for it by the community is definately reassurring, I have always felt the adobe community really hasnt utilized air to its full potential and we shall see the truth of that when Silverlight 3 goes RTM.

Some where in the mix of day 1 I was standing around talking with Rob Zelt and Pete Brown when this really nice looking blonde hottie comes up and hugs Rob Zelt and then apparently remembers Pete Brown too... The look on his face was pretty priceless. He didnt remember at all, and I know he was trying. I guess last year at Mix, Pete was trying to get the demo rubber ball to light up when he dropped on the ground and she saw his frustration and showed him how it works. The solution was it needed more muscle. Thats one way to get chicks to remember you Pete. Rob never really explained why he got the hug out of the group... What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas I guess, unless your Rob's wife, in that case let me reassure it was a friendly hug, it was more of shock that he knew one of the few women in the geek crowd.

The night ended at the Tao where the herd of people mingled at one of Vegas's awesome night clubs. I mingled with too many people to announce here, but overall day 1 ended solemly. There was a tweet up too, where I hung out with some cool people talking about... I dont remember, but I am sure it was interesting.

Day 2

Day 2 of mix had two very different keynotes, the first was the announcement of Internet Explorer 8, which was a surprise to me, I dont know why it was a surprise, obviously I wasnt keeping up with the browsers progress closely. The emotions around the browsers announcment was followed with alot of enthusiasm in the crowd with a not so much enthusiasm from twitter and facebook comments, I will say this, I loved the intro video, best video for Mix 09.

The keynote that followed was Debrah Adler who was fantastic. It was an honor to hear her speak and I hope people understood the importance of what she presented and the significance it has to our field. It's about changing the way we do things, it's about revolutionizing the experience for the person who matters, the user. It's about getting to know the user, the fact she used her Grandmother as one of her user personas and test cases made her care more about the output... a fact to be reminded of when you build your next application. She made a change that seems so obvious, yet was missed for years and by many different people. We should all approach our software solutions with the same passion for our users as Debrah has done. A great new motto for work tomorrow is, "Bad interfaces kill people, dont let your friends die to bad experiences with your applications."

I spent most of the rest of the day in the 3rd place area, networking with people. It was pretty spectacular, I followed Pete Brown around, because he's the man, but aside from that this is where the "incident" happened. It all started a while back when I have a bad habit of being baggy pants'd if you will... you know the college prank where you let your laptop or computer logged in while your away and your friends think its a cool idea to pull up some obscene image... except in this situation, the laptop was my phone and the baggy pants prank was when Anthony Handley decided to twitter some awesome stuff about David Hasselhoff to Rachel Appel, thats when Rob Zelt had the great idea of "hey, take a picture of my elbow, up close it looks like a Butt!!!" which they did. It was about this time that I hear enough giggling coming from the crowd behind me did I go, whats so funny, "HEY thats my phone". About 10 minutes later, I get a phone call from my Mother who wanted to know exactly what I was doing at mix that I would take a picture of some man's butt and put it on facebook, which is one of the places my twitter feed goes to. I explained that it wasnt a butt but rather an incredibly hairy man's bicep squeezed to his forearm, in which my mother said "Corey, I know what a butt looks like" and of course I lost the argument. Later my wife calls wanting to know why my Mom is calling her about a naked butt and wonders what I am doing in Vegas. I finally sent a picture of a zoomed out version which finally they caught on and I was moved back from the couch to sleeping in my bed status. And of course, during the whole moment everyone around me was just esstatic with the conversation. Needless to say I was Hoff'ed again.

The night finished with some private parties, one in particular was the silverlight insiders party with John Papa... John if you ever read this, your party was the best... I got to meet up with all my silverlight community buddies and it was a fantastic evening, even without the free stuff. Thanks to you and your crew for putting on a great time for everyone.

It was this night I had a good time with David Campbell (Wynapse/Silverlightcream), Page Brooks (Silverlight contrib), Pete Brown (The Man, Commodore Emulator), Rob Zelt (Ineta President and maker of "Real" applications), Jon Galloway (Ex-Hippie & Vertigo Awesomesauce), Brian Henderson (Shortest person at mix), Jon Stockton (His goatee threw me), and Anthony Handley (ChiTown homie). I would drop more names like Rick Barrazza who is an icon in the world of designer/developers from Cynergy, but I dont want to sound like a freak or a stalker... I think the names I mentioned would all confirm they let me follow them around.

Day 3

Day 3 was pretty uneventful, the first half was mainly catch up on the loss of sleep from the night before. When I finally did drag myself into the sessions, I spent most of the time in 3rd place downloading sessions and asking Peter Blois if he did any WPF/Silverlight work outside of developing Blend... in which he was like YEAH! and he showed me some cool demos that he had on his laptop. The rest of the day was kind of a blur, I met another "Corey" who does stuff in Silverlight (apparently Alvin Ashcraft has gotten us mixed up a few times), i wish i could have talked to him more but i was just down right beat. I left, Vegas shortly after.

Oh yeah, and with my final sentence of this Mix overview let me add, if you havent seen it... Pete Brown is going to be on Hanselman's podcast... I thought it was too cool of an experience to tell everyone himself so I followed him around and told everyone for him. I just hope if I am ever on Hanselman's podcast that he would do the same for me, ain't that right Pete?

Silverlight 2 Custom Control Gotchas

Corey — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:12:00 -0700

I have been working with custom controls for the past few weeks. I started off by working on my own control library with a loading curtain, color picker, and a cloud tag menu. Later I moved to working on a game concept were my game units utilized the custom control model.

As a side note, I found a unique reason to use custom controls over user controls and that is the ability to inherit from a base class. User Controls won't allow me to inherit from a base class that inherits from a usercontrol. At least at first glance, there may be a way to do it, but none I found.

So moving on, I thought I would share a few gotchas to keep in mind while developing custom controls, these are not in any particular order but I wanted to discuss them and provide others with a little bit of information:

1. Dependency Property Default Value

Thanks to a comment in my last post by "O'Reilly" (not sure if thats his real name) he pointed out that setting the default value can give you "unpredictable" results. In fact they are very predictable, but lets discuss that point some. When generating a default value for your dependency property its important to note that this is indeed a default value. The value itself will not initiate a property changed event when creating the item; furthermore, if a user provides a value equal to the default value it utilizes what I believe is called "Item Potency", in other words, it accepts the item but does not persist the value into a value changed event because the value did not change it instead silently accepts and ignores. Its important to note that you are fully responsible for the initial state of your custom control when you set a default value for your dependency properties.

So the alternative solution to setting a default value would be to set the default value of a dependency property inside the generic.xaml file in the style tag. The syntax looks similar to the following:

<Setter Property="Value" Value="20"/>

This would then call the value changed event after the template has been applied to your control.

2. Loaded Event vs. OnApplyTemplate

As a rule of thumb, put any initialization code in your custom control in the apply template override, specifically any code that modifies physical template elements that make up the custom control. And in case its not obvious, this includes initializations within the control's constructor. For those using WPF, you may recall this as not being the case; however, as quoted from MSDN Documentation:

“The timing of the Loaded event in Silverlight differs from the timing of the FrameworkElement.Loaded event in WPF. Specifically, the WPF Loaded event occurs after the template is applied. In Silverlight, the Loaded event is not guaranteed to occur after the template is applied.”

The key here is guaranteed! (In case someone tries it and it works for you.) The above information I owe to Page Brooks who when I was having trouble in my custom control he had a blog post that helped me get back on track.

3. Don't forget to set the generic.xaml build action to Resource!

Not really a gotcha unless you forget to do it... don't.

4. Turn off EventHandlers

If you haven't learned your lesson in silverlight 2 yet, be sure to get into the habit of turning off all event handlers you might register for in your custom controls. Specifically any events inside the OnApplyTemplate. I learned my lesson in the beta 2 works that if your dealing with large amounts of disposable controls, if you don't turn off those events then you will find that the memory for those controls will not be released until the silverlight application is disposed. You can do so by using the following syntax and utilizing "-=" instead of "+=":

LayoutRoot.MouseLeave -= new MouseEventHandler(LayoutRoot_MouseLeave);

Thats what I have for gotchas so far, I would definately be interested in any other gotchas you have with building custom controls in silverlight 2, so please feel free to share. I hope to showcase some demo code on my game as I wrap it up in the next week or so.

Dependency Properties and Silverlight 2

Corey — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:11:00 -0700

One aspect of Custom Control development is the understanding of Dependency Properties. Essentially what dependency properties do, is enhance the properties of your custom controls by utilizing what Microsoft has called Silverlight 2's Property System. Theres quite a bit of information about dependency Properties and you can get the MSDN lowdown here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc221408(VS.95).aspx; however, I figured I would explain what I have learned about them and give you the quick tour.

WHY
First, why should you use Dependency Properties in your controls? What do you gain by using them? In short these are my main reasons I have come up with.

Data Binding Support. You can only data bind dependency properties in Silverlight 2.
Animation Support. To animate using the property in Silverlight 2 requires the property to be a dependency property.
XAML Styling support, theres alot of aspects of styling not supported unless the property is a Dependency Property. This includes mainly Template Binding and Default Value settings mainly, but I think it also includes VSM support but since VSM is based on the animation and tweening, that should be obvious from my second reason.
Advanced Topic: Something I dont want to really cover right now or explain how to utilize but another advantage to using dependency properties is Attached Properties such as the use of "Grid.Column" and "Grid.Row" where the property is attached to a child element. Something that requires a little more of its own explanation of when, why, how to do such a thing.

Thats about it, not a huge list, but those are the main aspects of why you should use Dependency Properties.

HOW
The next part I would like to talk about how to use dependency properties, what does it take to build dependency properties. For the most part dependency properties are fairly straight forward but they are slightly more complex to create than traditional properties. I think the best way to show "how" to use dependency properties is to simply show an example of one.

old property

   1:  private decimal width = 20.0;

   2:  public decimal Width

   3:  {

   4:     get { return width; }

   5:     set { width = value; }

   6:  }

dependency property

   1:  public static readonly DependencyProperty WidthProperty =

   2:    DependencyProperty.Register(

   3:    "Width",

   4:    typeof(decimal),

   5:    typeof(NAME_OF_CONTROL), //example typeof( LoadingCurtain)

   6:    new PropertyMetadata(20.0,

   7:        new PropertyChangedCallback(OnWidthChanged)

   8:    )

   9:  );

  10:  public decimal  Width

  11:  {

  12:      get { return (decimal)GetValue(WidthProperty); }

  13:      set { SetValue(WidthProperty, value); }

  14:  }

  15:  private static void OnWidthChanged(DependencyObject d,

  16:      DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)

  17:  {

  18:      decimal _width = (decimal)d;

  19:      ...

  20:  }

What is important to note here in this sample is there are 3 seperate things:

1. There is a read only static declaration of the dependency property. The second "typeof(NAME_OF_CONTROL)" would actually be the type of the custom control you are housing the dependency property or a better way to put it is the custom control with the dependency property.

2. The second object looks very similar to any regular property except when setting the values it uses the GetValue and SetValue commands you probably have seen in various other controls in Silverlight 2. This is still required to make your property a real property in your control, its the wiring that is what is important, DO NOT put any other additional code in this properties get and set blocks.

3. The final bit is the on property changed event handler, this is where ALL logic goes after the property has been changed. Its important to do any and all logic here.

That concludes my primer on Dependency properties, I hope to cover more advanced topics on silverlight 2 custom controls as I dive into them.

Delving into Silverlight 2

Corey — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:09:00 -0700

I have started working deeper into custom controls in Silverlight 2. I am more impressed with the power and capabilities behind building custom controls, I plan to release some of these controls publicly in the coming days as I clean up the "learn process" and make it more of a concrete and real control. I am building a color picker control and of course the loading curtain as well. My only real issues regarding the development of custom controls is the lack of support in developing and designing these items in Visual Studio and Blend. I have found myself doing some rather hackish things to get them to work.

For Example, I created a User Control that I develop the custom control as a user control so that I have full style capabilities inside expression blend. As I finalize a look and feel of a template, I then copy and paste the xaml into the generic.xaml and massage it so that it works appropriately.

Not exactly something to be proud of in a workflow, but it works until Microsoft solves this problem, and I am sure they are solving it. In the meantime, I have been collecting some rather useful information about custom controls and I plan to talk about them over the next few weeks in my blog.

I have really felt compelled to begin a resource collective for silverlight but I am not sure where or how to start. I think Silverlight 2 really needs to have a "Flash Kit" for the silverlight community. A place to share custom controls, skins, templates, sounds, and even test projects.

Silverlight 2 - Building Custom Controls (The Loading Curtain)

Corey — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:45:00 -0700

So I recently did this talk to the Chicago .net User Group and found alot of interest in it so I felt like this would be a good demo to share to the masses. The idea is to build a useful custom control but also something simple enough to introduce the makings of how to build custom controls.

Custom Controls are one of the most powerful aspects to functional reuse and design independence and after you get over the hump of knowing how they work and what it takes to make them work, using them can be beneficial. There are more advanced topics with this I plan to address in at a later date.

Source Files used in demo: Magenic.Demo.CustomControlApp.zip (595.78 kb)

Silverlight Custom Controls at CNUG

Corey — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:08:00 -0700

Last night I spoke at CNUG and I promised today I would have all the materials up and so that is what I plan to do. Below you will find both my powerpoint presentation as well as the visual studio project files from the demo. I took the liberty of including the links I had mentioned in my talk and posting them below as well. If you missed my talk, I will be putting up a video demo of how to build custom controls on my blog for Friday evening.

Power Point Slides: Silverlight_Controls.pptx (1.02 mb)

Visual Studio 2008 Project Files: Silverlight 2 Controls.zip (1.25 mb)

Links:
CD2UG (Chicago Designers and Developers User Group) - http://www.cd2ug.org/
Silverlight Getting Started - http://www.silverlight.net/GetStarted/
Silverlight Toolkit - http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight

Ux Tip 2 - UX Review

Corey — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:08:00 -0700

Its been quite some time since my last blog entry, I thought I would start off the year with my next ux tip for building better applications. Let's be honest, I rarely get called into a project until development is well under way, and when I do the first thing I do is review the application in terms of it's User Experience. And for this tip I am going to give you the breakdown of how and what I look at in such a review so that you can begin to review your own applications as well as develop applications with these concepts in mind.

I begin my review by breaking the application down into six different aspects of User Experience and I note the positives and negatives of each aspect... what works and what doesn't those aspects are as follows:

1. Communication

How well does your application communicate to the user. In most situations we as business application developers are in the habit of creating forms with a simple 1 or 2 word label and some sort of input field. The big problem is we rarely write descriptions into these forms. We rarely describe the field outside of the 1 or 2 word label and sometimes that is just not enough to explain the input field. Additionally the overall application, the overall form itself may require some simple descriptions in why or what the user is filling out. And don't just stop there, context sensitive help, tool tips, even taking a note from MS Money and provide camtasia like videos showing some brief examples of how a particular function works when its not straight forward can help communicate and lower the need for training of your applications.

2. Usability

This is probably the most synonymous to UX, how usable is your application. How intuitive is your application. There are plenty of sources of what this is and what it takes to make a usable application. A simple and easy way to determine how usable your application is, simply sit behind several users using your application without helping them with it. Let them sit down and just use it... you will be surprised where users may stumble in your application and provide very clear areas you may need to improve.

3. Visual Aesthetics

Visual Aesthetics is probably the most bizarre to some application developers as well as the most obvious to understand. We as a world generally care what something looks like it, we make decisions and spend billions of dollars on physical appearances of things consciously and subconsciously. I have been in many different development shops who quote the same thing... "I don't care what it looks like, Our users care more that it works and makes their job easier." I wont deny this as true, but I guarantee you if you application was compared to a equally working application that looks better, everyone would choose the better looking application. Its just plain fact. People do care of the physical appearance of things, and as users are more exposed to technology all around them, expectations in this department will continue to be raised. Don't let your applications feel dated by simply having an application with zero visual appeal.

4. Utility

Utility is my own term, and probably the reason most of us are employed into application development. What I mean by utility is how useful is the application. Is the work flow accomplishing its usefulness, is the interface doing what it set out to do. One of the most common mistakes I have seen in the past was business mainframe UI's converted to web based applications. Most developers didn't take the quick response and the simple fact mainframe users never really dealt with a mouse and presented these users with a web based solution. The usefulness was lost in translation and what was intended to be a better system all to often cost more time instead of saving it. The key point is make sure your application is accomplishing its stated and sometimes unstated goals.

I always use the analogy of the swiss army knife... I once had a magazine with all sorts of different swiss army knifes. Each had a different collection of blades, tools, toothpicks, pliers, spoons, etc... The idea is making sure you have the right knife set for the job. The same holds true for our applications.

5. Delivery

Delivery is simple, small and in the world of business applications sometimes overlooked. The basic concept is your application delivering appropriately to the audience. Make sure you're not giving them a web app when they need a windows app, and vice versa. Make sure it works in the users screen resolution, that it runs effectively with their PC's. Simple, easy, and if it fails, it fails horribly.

6. Hype

Last but not least is hype, the major concern I have on any job is how do users feel about the new application. Are they happy with it, what are their expectations, do they look forward to the new changes... hype is important. Its important your users have a good vibe, a good attitude towards what you're developing. A great application can fail in the eyes of the business if the users have a bad attitude towards change. It can be the difference if users use the application or continue doing what they did before the application was ever built... or keeps them from constantly complaining and making your developments look bad.

Twin Cities Code Camp Source

Corey — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:37:00 -0700

Twin Cities was the place to be last weekend, I spent the weekend at the Twin Cities Code Camp and they even let me present something on Silverlight 2. If you were present at the camp, I hope you enjoyed it, and as promised I have the source files available along with my dinky slide. Additionally I said I would provide some links and those will be below.

Demo Source Project: Image Viewer Demo.zip (810.79 kb)

Artist XAML, copy of Page.xaml only: Page_xaml.zip (7.06 kb)

Presentation Slides: Silverlight2 Introduction Demo.pptx (528.78 kb)

Additionally some had asked where I had gotten my snippet manager, it was actually the snippet manager used by the Silverlight team at Mix '08 and was built using WPF. I found it at Karen Corby's blog: http://scorbs.com/2008/03/18/snippetmanager.

Now additional links from my talk:

1. Tutorials on Visual State Manager:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/06/04/silverlight-introduces-visual-state-manager-vsm.aspx

2. Silverlight 2 and accessing ASP.net Security:
http://www.coreysportfolio.com/post/2008/05/Silverlight-2-and-User-Identity.aspx

3. Silverlight and WCF
http://silverlight.net/blogs/msnow/archive/2008/09/22/silverlight-tip-of-the-day-43-silverlight-enabled-wcf-services-versus-asmx-web-services.aspx

4. Silverlight Controls Explained by Karen Corby! 4 Parts:
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/11/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-1-of
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/18/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-2-of-4
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/23/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-3-of-4
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/25/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-4-of-4

5. Finally always check out http://www.silverlight.net.

I Had fun, thanks to everyone who was there. I hope you enjoyed it and I can't wait to make it back to Twin Cities again.

Silverlight 2 Final has been released!!!

Corey — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:25:00 -0700

As I expected this morning, Scott Guthrie announced the final version of Silverlight 2 will release early, tomorrow, October 14th, 2008. This means its time to update your beta 2 sources out there, as Beta 2 is not compatible with the final release and users will automatically be updated. The official press release can be read here. So anything new?

Visual Studio 2008 has extended its support to the express editions!!! Designers and non-owners of Visual Studio can now use the free express editions to build Silverlight 2 which means designers won't have to purchase the VS.
Adoption to the plugin is growing. All previous versions will auto update to the latest version.
There is an open source control pack available on codeplex for a series of new controls, check it out at http://www.codeplex.com. I dont have the exact link just yet.
- Controls available: DockPanel, WrapPanel, ViewBox, Label, HeaderedContentControl, Expander, TreeView, NumericUpDown, AutoComplete and Accordion are available
The fact sheet for Silverlight 2 can be found here.
The actual recording of the press release can be found here.

UX Tip 1 - Personas

Corey — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:35:00 -0700

Probably every developer in the .net community has seen the sound clips to Steve Balmer chanting "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers". I even saw a few videos of songs created on the whole event. In the world of your application and User-Centered-Design, every person on your project should be chanting "Users, Users, Users, Users" with the same passion and vigor as Steve Balmer.

It comes to no surprise that my first tip for bringing better user experiences in your applications would be to look at the one person that matters, your users. Creative Directors do this by creating what is known as Personas. According to Wikipedia, the real dictionary of the world, "Persona's are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product".

If you really want to improve your applications you really need to take the time to create a few persona's and i am going to help you in that task by providing a small, simple activity to follow.

1. Create 3-4 Persona's based on your users.

2 Persona's that represent 80% of your user base.
1 Persona that represents the "influence" role... aka managers/decision makers
and finally create 1 persona that is administrator/upkeep role

Example of a Persona from http://www.steptwo.com/

Bob is 52 years old and works as a mechanic with an organization offering road service to customers when their car breaks down. He has worked in the job for the past 12 years and knows it well. Many of the younger mechanics ask Bob for advice when they meet up in the depot as he always knows the answer to tricky mechanical problems. Bob likes sharing his knowledge with the younger guys, as it makes him feel a valued part of the team.

Bob works rolling day and night shifts and spends his shifts attending breakdowns and lockouts (when customers lock their keys in the car). About 20% of the jobs he attends are complex and he occasionally needs to refer to his standard issue manuals. Bob tries to avoid using the manuals in front of customers as he thinks it gives the impression he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Bob has seen many changes over the years with the company and has tried his best to move with the times. However he found it a bit daunting when a new computer was installed in his van several years ago, and now he has heard rumors that the computer is going to be upgraded to one with a bigger screen that’s meant to be faster and better.

Bob’s been told that he will be able to access the intranet on the new computer. He has heard about the intranet and saw once in an early version on his manager’s computer. He wonders if he will be able to find out want’s going on in the company more easily, especially as customers’ seem to know more about the latest company news than he does when he turns up at a job. This can be embarrassing and has been a source of frustration for Bob throughout his time with the company.

Bob wonders if he will be able to cope with the new computer system. He doesn’t mind asking his grandchildren for help when he wants to send an email to his brother overseas, but asking the guys at work for help is another story.

Now, of course this could be very basic exercises, some applications that are corporate enterprise based may be more complex, but I encourage you to stay focused. The more persona's you create the more muddy your application becomes. The more complicated, the more I would encourage you to bring in an interaction designer.

2. Now go through your application in the mind set of each of these persona's. Try to think in their frame of mind, and jot down changes each persona would really benefit from to make their jobs easier and facilitate the requirements better. Its very important to do each persona separate from the other. Stick with 1 persona each day or half day. Don't cross pollinate, you want to avoid personal confliction and persona confliction at this stage.

3. Finally after its all said and done, take each notes and review the notes and weight the positives and negatives of each change/request to a positive or negative number to each persona. Would a particular change benefit this persona some, none, or not effect it. I go with a simple calculation of +1, -1, or 0 for not effected by change.

Thats it, thats the basics to persona capturing. Of course there can be more to it, but I guarantee that if your looking for ways to improve your UX of your existing applications, this exercise can really make a difference. Its important to really think outside your developer "frame of mind". But overall this is a very simple, very basic, and very effective way to overall improving the UX of your application. If anything, its a start in the right direction.

Kuler for Expression Design and Blend

Corey — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:55:00 -0700

I was recently informed via twitter by Jon Galloway of a new project on Codeplex, "Colorful Expression", and application designed to be an add-in for Expression Design and Expression Blend to give you the kuler community in the Expression suite. Its a great idea, one I had even thought of myself after seeing the new add in feature of Kuler built into the next version of Adobe Flash CS4. It currently lets you browse the submitted color schemes in the Kuler community, but I expect it to evolve over time into equal functionality of the full Kuler experience.

So if you like Kuler, but looking to use it with your Silverlight designs, then definately check out colorful Expression.