Designer WPF

My previous post is the first one that I’ve used Windows Live Writer to create. I changed from the default WordPress blog post composer because Live Writer gives me the following features:

• I don’t have to upload my images file-by-file… I just use OneNote to screen grab and then copy and paste from OneNote into Live Writer and Live Writer just uploads everything to my site. My posts are pretty image heavy, so I probably saved about 30 minutes of time with this feature alone.
• The Paste from Visual Studio plug-in lets me… well… paste from Visual Studio and maintain the colors and formatting. You’ll probably see more code integrated into my posts, since I hate putting in code that isn’t color coordinated. Time saved: about 15 minutes
• I don’t lose my posts to some web or Javascript weirdness. The posts I put up take, on average, 2 hours to create. Losing my work is devastating.
• Super simple interface. I don’t know what team at Microsoft was working on this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they took their cues from the OneNote team. Huge Interaction Designer props for harnessing the power of simplicity and elegance. I never have to ask myself how to do something… it is transparent. Now, maybe I’m not trying to do enough complex stuff, but I’m ok with that. Way to design 90% of the audience rather than agonize over that last 10%.

Go get it.

So I recently found and installed the WPF Performance Suite, which I’ve found to be nice and easy to use.

Microsoft documentation on using the WPF Performance Suite.

As a designer, I’ve found the Perforator a particularly useful tool in the suite.

Perforator is a performance profiling tool for analyzing rendering behavior. The Perforator main window displays a set of options that allow you to analyze very specific rendering behavior in parts of your application.

Key for me in this suite is the “Frame rate” counter in this application. As you probably know, the human eye is pretty comfortable with 30-60 frames per second (for computer applications). Because WPF allows the simple creation of animations to aid usability and design, smooth frame rates have become important to me.

 If they’re important to you, I highly reccomend the above suite.

Get it. Use it. Love it.

ListView header Styling is one of the most difficult styling pieces I’ve had to deal with. Part of this is because it is just another part of the seemingly endlessly complex listview. The other part is just because of the way the styling for the listview is put together in WPF.

In this post, we’re going to change the default color of the header (background and foreground) and make the headers look more like bubbles. Why? Because we can! (Everytime I say that, somewhere a usability expert loses a little bit of their soul.)

Take note that anything done in this will affect the whole header. If you’re looking to do something to one individual column in the header, you need to go to this post on ColumnHeaders (coming soon). See the bottom of this post for more details.

As a point of note, the easy way in this particular case involves going directly into the XAML and the hard way involves going through the steps in Blend. The easy way is posted at the bottom.

Now for the hard way. First, go to your listview, right click on it and go to:

Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…

Continue reading ‘Styling the ListView Column Header’ »

I just signed up for MIX 08, Microsoft’s annual Vegas conference for web developers an designers. They’ve extended the early bird deadline to January 31st, so head over there and sign up now!

As a general rule, I’m more inclined toward the hard client at the moment, but that has been in a large part because:

• I’m getting paid to do WPF stuff.
• I’m not a coding guru which makes alot of the more intense web development stuff somewhat outside my reach.
• Its easier to do fun and cool stuff with WPF than with Silverlight. Or Flash. Or Javascript.
• I’m getting paid to do WPF stuff.

Even so, it should be a fun time. Especially if the MIX promotional material (seen below) is to be believed.

I am under the impression that the women in the rightmost image are the kind of cutting edge web developers I will be schmoozing with at MIX08.

Please, leave me to my ignorance.