Hi, We're starting an implementation project for a Windows application that we've already designed (form, content and behavior is done). The design involves some eye-candy and transitions that would be trivial to implement with WPF, but not so trivial with Windows Forms.
To help the coders concentrate on coding, were considering to re-draw our Photoshop+OmniGraffle originals with the shining new MS Expression Designer+Blend toolset, hoping that the output is directly useful WPF/ XAML/C# input for Visual Studio. We also hope that, using the new tools, we could fine-tune the UI directly in the Visual Studio project during the development. MS Expression Blend promises that this is possible, so I've tried the 60-day product, read some manuals and watched some seminars and tutorials. My personal impression is that the drawing tools are easy to pick up, but the storyboard/timeline concepts and Visual Studio integration require learning and practice - maybe 2-4 weeks to get a hang of it. Our likely alternative is to use the traditional Windows Forms approach, but I've got questions for anyone who has used Expression Blend to do some Real Work(tm): 1) Did you find the product complete and stable enough for your production environment? What kind of difficulties have you encountered? --> In this podcast four out of four presentations suffered from demo effects, related or not: http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/6/c/76c2736f-b307-4625-bc49-724b25216c2f/KYN003.wmv ("Designing Windows Experiences by Robby Ingebretsen (Identity Mine) and Beau Ambur (Metaliq) ... Join two top designers as they show how they created next generation experiences using Expression Blend and Expression Design. Learn best practices for creating experiences that are anything but lowest-common-denominator.") 2) Did it help the team to come up with better results in the end? Did you save time? 3) Do you recommend Expression Blend? Why? Thank you for your time, - Petteri -- Petteri Hiisilä Senior Interaction Designer iXDesign / +358505050123 / [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated." - Tim Peters ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
