Don’t just learn about the latest Natural User Interface technologies from Microsoft, give em a try with our full day developer/designer hands on competition. From designing to prototyping to building apps, this packed competitive day will team up designers with developers, creating a series of RIA apps, all in a day, and all to be judged for a grand prize.

Stay tuned for dates and times.

James

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Dynamic Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend is a book coming out in late 2009 through Que Publishing and is being written by Chris Bernard and Sara Summers. It will teach you everything you need to know to create rich and dynamic prototypes using SketchFlow in Expression Blend.

Check it out…good stuff if you want a solid intro to SketchFlow:

http://www.dynamic-prototyping.com/

James

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Exciting day – Silverlight 3 was launched today, as well as Expression Studio 3!

With Silverlight version 3, the feature list delivers innovation and benefits to key areas of rich internet applications, including:

• Support for true high definition video
• Out-of-browser functionality
• Smooth Streaming
• Improved line of business support, including data validation and element-to-element databinding
• Pixel shaders for deeper rendering control
• More than 90 controls and themes, with source code and unit tests for many of them in the Silverlight Toolkit

To learn more about Silverlight 3 you can go here or get more insight from some of my colleagues blogs:

In addition to the availability of Silverlight 3, the release candidate of Expression Blend 3 and SketchFlow were announced today.  In addition, the full family of Expression Studio 3 products will be available within thirty days!

SketchFlow is a very innovative prototyping tool that comes with Expression Blend.  This dynamic prototyping feature in Microsoft Expression® Blend™ 3, demonstrates the flow, layout, and transitions of an application through interactive “sketches” to convey initial concepts.  And concurrent workflows between design, user experience, and development ensure that the visuals, interaction model, and the underlying architecture of an application can be simultaneously evolved and delivered as a completed project.

“Soma” Somasegar, Sr. VP at Microsoft has a very good post on SketchFlow here.  Also, visit Microsoft Expression for more information or click here to download a copy of Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Release Candidate.

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I’m currently working with a highly visible government customer and they were really interested in using Silverlight for data visualization. They specifically came across the cool “jelly charts” Richard Zadorozny created a while back in Silverlight 1.0, which have some really cool visual effects displaying and easing data.

Perfect. We should be able to just pipe in data to these charts, and off we go, right? Well, not so fast. After our initial efforts in trying to  convert the POC sample code from the Jelly Charts, it wasn’t really feasible to use this codebase for a robust charting solution.

So this effort kicked off conversations with David Anson, Silverlight Toolkit Charting developer, and Pete Brown who’s done some cool stuff around the SL Toolkit Charts. After brainstorming on how we can bring the cool effects of the Jelly Charts sample and still be able to leverage the robust package of the Silverlight Toolkit, David was able to create a really cool solution in which he outlines in his lastest blog post how to acheive this effect:

Check out the full post from David Anson, here:

http://beta.blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2009/06/15/peanut-butter-jelly-time-how-to-create-a-pleasing-visual-effect-with-silverlight-wpf-charting.aspx

Check it out and enjoy!

James

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I have 7 red, half-gallon gas cans sitting in my garage right now.

Why? Let me tell you why. Pride.

It was about 7:30pm on a Friday evening in Dallas, Texas when my wife and I were heading to a concert with some friends. We were cruising down 635 in our black 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee and life was good. Gonna get away, enjoy the night when an ever so familiar sound came from the dash of our Jeep.

Bing. Low fuel.

I look at my wife and she looks at me – and the ever so familiar conversation takes place.

“Honey, we need gas,” I said.

“No, we can make it….we’re gonna be late, and you know the Jeep really let’s you go way further than our other car.”

So we push it.

And the inevitable happens. A few miles down the road….*putter*, *ppput*…we coast to the side of the road. I get out the Jeep, look around, and start my trek down the road.

2 and a half MILES down the road, I find a 7-eleven when I walk straight in and know the spare gas cans are 3rd isle and on the right. It looks like this will make 7 in my gas can collection.

Why am I telling you this? Time and time again in speaking with customers, they don’t realize the need for good user experience in their development projects until it is WAY too late. Users are stranded. Confused. And stuck on the side of the road wondering why the “system” is so confusing and hard to use. We wait way too long to fill up and continue to say to ourselves “We shouldn’t care about the user experience.”….”That’s just overhead”…and time and time again we end up on the side of the road stuck, out of gas, and reluctant to have to add yet another gas can to our already large collection.

User experience really does matter. And let me tell you why.

I recently finished up working on a project with a government customer who was looking to update a legacy mapping system. The system was old. Dated. And needed some serious help in making the app more usable and productive. In fact, since the UI was so difficult to use, often times the high ranking government officials would prefer passing on using the system rather and go with straight up paper for mapping out the scenarios they needed.

Why should you care to wireframe or storyboard when you’re dying to diving into whatever project you are in?

Two reasons. Time. And Money.

Stop waiting your efforts in trying to fix a broken app that has zero usability. Start thinking “How can I make sure this app really does make sense from the user’s view?”

Enough of my rant….I know you get it and want to know how…..so that’s why I’m working to push out more video posts and less reading. I’m just like you when it comes to “show me” style of learning.

Stay tuned.

J

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Ok, so it’s been waaaaaaaaay too long since I’ve blogged last. And I actually have an excuse.

Work.

Yeah, I’ve been heads down working on this project with my team called the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI).  This is a very cool project, while not in itself is the breakthrough RIA of the year – it can be used to create some crazy apps/mashups/whatever on any UI stack out there. I’ll talk some more about this project in a follow up post, but search twitter with #OGDI and you’ll see what people are talking about.

So that’s my excuse….and for all new to my ramblings, this is my new home. Lots to come in the near future. I’m tired of talking the talk and I’m in the mood to walk it and share videos heavily via my blog. You know…stuff that I’d actually watch if I was in the trenches trying to conquer projects day in and day out.

Stay in touch or follow me on twitter via @okayjames…

James

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