Introduction
When a brand new technology comes into the programmers' hands, they try to play with it till they find out the concepts in front of or behind it.
Walking through declarative programming and Marc Clifton's MyXaml and hearing the "XAML" word from Microsoft during the past two years and also downloading WinFX CTP downloads made me and of course many expert programmers work around the new Microsoft Platform for future applications.
This sample is only a demonstration of what I've done in my First Avalon Try.
The Tools
I've developed the project in Expression Interactive Designer (EID) from the first step. Although it's possible to create WPF applications in Visual Studio Orcas and its designer ("Cider"), you'll lose the greater Control and Data Template designers if you prefer not to choose EID.
Updated
To run the project, you need to have WinFX February 2006 CTP installed. To Open, View, Edit and Compile it, you'll need to have Expression Interactive Designer March 2006 CTP. For Visual Studio 2005 build environment, please install Windows SDK 5308 and Visual Studio Orcas with Visual Studio 2005.
Databinding
The sample project uses Expression Tutorial Data which is installed with EID by default and should be copied to the C:\ root directory to work (this is true for EID samples as well).
The project has some databinding and also data templates right in the XAML code to show the product list and the corresponding image, description and price.
The Animation
As the screen shot shows me, the UI is more like a game interface than a Windows Desktop Application. Putting translucent backgrounds which makes the right button panel with glass effect is the job of the control template and visual tree rendering system.
For seeing how animation could work on events such as OnMouseEnter
or OnMouseLeave
or even OnClick
, try to navigate over the buttons and Right-Click/Left-Click the buttons, to see them animate.
Help Needed
As you may have found already, this is my first article on The Code Project. I'm not really experienced in such things and have tried to work around my job which is designing systems and coding most of the time. So I'm new to this. Any help to improve my skills in publishing my work will be much appreciated.
History
- 3rd May, 2006 - Original article
- 3rd May, 2006 - The Tools section updated with Run and Build environment requirements