A couple of weeks ago, I requested to build a code sample for Microsoft. It was supposed to make it possible to restyle a Silverlight application based on a SharePoint 2010 theme. In SharePoint 2010, theming is based on OpenXML, and saved as files with an extension of “thmx”.
But I guess the first question would be WHY you would use a huge thmx file just to restyle a Silverlight application… Well, imagine that you are building Silverlight applications that are to be used inside a SharePoint application. Imagine how nice it would be if the Silverlight applications would change appearance if you changed the theme of the SharePoint site. That way, changing the theme would not be a problem, and would not cause a whole lot of rework.
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In my last post I wrote about how I had created a ViewModelLocator that was a bit different from what everyone else was using. I had come up with the awesome idea to use the same VMs at design-time as I used at run-time. This idea sounds very good, as it means that I only needed to build a single set of VMs and instead could switch the service implementations using DI. At the time, it sounded like the most “correct” solution. Little duplicated code, no chance of messing up the bindings and so on…but it has a huge problem…
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[UPDATE] This post is somewhat interesting, but the idea doesn’t really work in the real world. More info HERE [/UPDATE]
I have tried to stay out of certain areas when I blog. Why? Well, simply because some things are still heavily debated, and some debates even seem a bit infected. Some topics seem to cause people to get somewhat rabid and I don’t feel like causing a big flame war of any kind. But still, I have decided to talk a bit about some of the options we have when binding our views to our viewmodels, or vice versa. I can’t even write that with out having to be careful…
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First off, I need to say that these are my personal thoughts. They might contain erroneous information, they might be way off mark and they might be missing out on a lot of things, but this is what I am thinking of the platform at the moment. I also have to mention that however this post will sound, I have VERY high hopes for the phone, and I think that it will be very successful. One should also remember that it is not yet released so a lot can happen, and also that it is the first release of a whole new thing…
Please read the whole thing, don’t just take out small parts of the post. I will try to put down as much of my thoughts as I can in this post, and if you just read parts of it, you will probably get a somewhat distorted view…
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So…as you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been posting as aggressively today as I did yesterday…(Well…it wasn’t actually yesterday… I started writing this post when it was yesterday, but got sidetracked and had to continue today, Wednesday). There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I have meet WAY too many people I knew to just sit in a corner and write blog posts. Second, I went to the official party last night…which was interesting with about 4000 people attending and only about 50 girls except for the staff…
But anyhow, the yesterday progressed as it should, a great keynote and lots of interesting sessions about the WP7. And even though I have found some gaps in the platform, I still find it VERY interesting. Not to mention that the UI is the cleanest looking UI I have ever seen on a phone. I guess I want to try it before saying it is the best UI, but it looks very promising…
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After my last session, which was about designing applications so that it fits in to Microsoft’s Metro layout, somebody asked why the tiles on the home page of the phone was off center with a gutter at the top and right. The answer was awesome and shows how much thought the design team has put into the layout. Or the guy on stage knows how to bullshit convincingly without any preparation. The answer was simply that the gutters where there for the touch gestures. By having a gutter the user won’t unintentionally start an application when it was supposed to be a drag to move around the screen. The right gutter simplifies scrolling vertically while the top one simplifies horizontal scrolling… As I said, either VERY well thought through or really good BS…
I have just attended the 2nd WP7 session. This was another 100 level, which means that it just just another run through of the vision and platform and stuff. No dev stuff yet. It did produce some new information though. First, the Silverlight environment on the phone will be a superset of Silverlight 3. That is SL 3 with some SL 4 features and some “custom” stuff. This first surprised me, but it is pretty obvious to be honest. A lot of the new features in v4 extended the offline feature of SL, which won’t be available on the phone anyway.
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As some of you might now, I have left Wellington and gone to Las Vegas for the MIX10 conference. I just saw an interesting keynote. However, I felt it being somewhat boring. There were no big surprises. A lot of Windows Phone 7 Series talk, which was to be expected. One of the news that did come up however, is that the dev platform will be made available for free. This is an awesome step. It will enable a lot of devs to try it out without having to commit too much. This will in turn hopefully give us a lot of interesting applications and maybe even lure some non .NET devs into the Microsoft space. One can at least hope…
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