My buddy and podcast-partner Dax has released reuxables, a theme framework for WPF applications.  Dax has been working with WPF and Silverlight since pre-alpha, and has had a passion for UX development forever.   Something that I've always struggled with as a developer is the fact that my UI's are either boxy (tr's and td's) or gun-metal-grey win-form's.  While Dax kept telling me how easy it was to add a little style to interfaces, the best I could ever do was to send him my HTML, and he'd send back something that looked awesome.   With reuxables, through the magic of inheritance and injection, you code up your WPF application, and then select the theme.  Every control on the page is auto-magically themes--- professional UX's at a fraction of the cost --- wow.  I wish I would have learned earlier in my career how important the UX is -- when you are briefing the boss, they need to see a good looking UI, or you won't get your next funding cycle.

Check them out, and download a trial -- you'll be glad you did!

Dax and I have been talking on revolUXions about the magic of WPF/E Silverlight for awhile now.  The recent announcements have really made my head spin.  Dax and I needed time to digest all the information before we recorded the next show!

What holds the most promise for me is the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).  We've been experiencing a ton of scalability problems with our JavaScript framework (once the visualizations gets thousands of data points), so the promise of 1000x increase in performance using C# over JavaScript is enticing.  Expect to see some benchmarks from me, because this is certainly a pain point for us.

I've been doing a bit of Ruby work lately.  Everyone should lean a new language every so often (and no, learning VB.Net after you've programmed C# doesn't count).  At first I was lovin' me some rails, but I've since grown enamored with the language itself.  I love the DRY principle (don't repeat yourself), the convention of only declaring and defining things once, and I both love and hate duck typing (I love it when it works, I hate it when it doesn't). 

The thing I hate the most, though, is the lack of a real IDE, and the lack of a compiler.  These problems will both be solved by the integration of Dynamic languages in Silverlight.  I can't wait to try IronRuby!

Below is a diagram I found that gives an overview of the platform vision.

or, at least a new RSS feed home

Dax has been busy!  We moved over the revolUXions to a real blog engine.  Unfortunately, everyone needs to update the links...

RSS feed

We'll have comments enabled on each show, so any feedback would be great.

Stay tuned to the blog, we have a bunch of new ideas for the show, as well as some silverlight discussions

Dax and I just posted the next revolUXions, "New Controls in WPF, Part 1."  In this episode we look at the new controls available in WPF and .NET 3.

Dax Pandhi talks WPF and Expression
Graphics guru and WPF wonk Dax Pandhi shares his thoughts on WPF, WPF/e, Expression suite in general, and Blend in particular. You'll hear the story of how Dax came to be the Pwop graphics guy as well as his contributions to the WPF community.

Listen to the show..

As Dax and I have been saying over on revolUXions, MS has listened to the feedback and will be releasing Expressions as part of the MSDN network.  I'm not surprised at all -- in the last few years MS has really turned into a company that listens to the community well (Team System pricing, etc).

Kudo's, though, for listening!

Full post about the announcement

Dax and I are recording a few more revolUXions, but we are thinking about having a Q&A show.  Do you have any questions about XAML, WPF, WPF/E, Blend, or VisualStudio integration?  Give a shout to revolUXions [at] nukeation.com before April 7, 2007.

Dax and I recorded episode #5 of revolUXions and just posted it.  I wanted to really understand the integration and workflow issues which XAML and MS-Blend is going to help us solve.  I've worked with so many designers in the past where the work product has been a Photoshop-file.  On past projects, a few weeks before ship, I get a photoshop file containing the look and feel of the product.  Not anymore -- as we show in this episode, the designer (working in MS Blend) hands off a DLL file which encapsulates the look and feel of the app, while the developer (working in VisualStudio) just 'add a reference' to the new DLL, and all the interface components change  to the new look.

Running time: 12:04

Dax and I are hard at work on the next revolUXions.  We haven’t recorded the episode yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.  Being a developer, I’m always worried about trying to integrate the design and the application at the last minute.  I’ve been on many projects where the last weekend was spent trying to cut and paste the designers graphics into the site, only to have the site look hickly-pickly.  For the first several episodes we’ve spent exploring the Blend, but to me it really doesn’t matter how good it looks until we try to integrate the graphic look and feel into the final application.  In this episode Dax is going to design some dark tone-on-tone reflective buttons in Blend, hand them off to me as a DLL, and I’m going to integrate them into my Visual Studio 2005 project to create an application.  Isn’t this the promise, that Designers can Design, and Developers can Develop, each in their own environment? 

Stay tuned…

Dax and I recordered another revolUXions.  This time we take a look at one of the most innovative features of WPF - animations. We create a custom button and apply mouse hover animation to it.

Running time: 09:42

revolUXions.