Since we appear to be in another revolution on user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX), I’ve seen a lot of people, companies, sites refer to the designer-developer workflow, including Microsoft.  Heck we’re building tools around it for Silverlight and WPF development!  One thing I see too often though is the conversation being diminished to UI only. 

I’ve heard conversations between developers saying things like yeah, now we just need a designer to make things look pretty or we take what the designer made pretty and put functionality behind it.

I have a plea for my developer brethren: please stop using the word pretty and diminishing the role a designer plays in defining UI/UX.

To me when I hear this I cringe for two reasons.  First, while I’m not a designer, I consider myself to have a strong appreciation for design and know that it isn’t easy to execute on a design for everyone.  Second I know many talented people in the design world who understand much more about how UI affects end user productivity and emotion more than just ‘making it pretty.’  So please stop, it’s insulting to the trade I think.

Imagine if you heard a conversation of designers…

Designer A: Sweet design man, I love how you anticipate the user’s next interaction and use the typography to really identify that action.
Designer B: Yeah, it took a lot of research and usability observations, but I think we got it right. I hope the developers can finish this up so we can get it in the user’s hands.
Designer A: Totally, I’m sure they’ll finish the macros soon, I think it’s all wizard based anyway.
Designer B: Yep, I mean, I’ve created an Access application before, how hard can it be.

Yeah, see what I mean?  If you are insulted by hearing someone talking about the development craft reduced to macros and Access, then you should realize you’re doing the same thing.  Design is a craft just like software development and there are patterns and meaning to things that designers do, both in interactive design and print design.  It isn’t just about picking the right template.  Sure, palettes and animations are a part of the design, but their intent in the final design usually isn’t without thought.  Reducing a designer’s craft down to a simple “pretty” isn’t cool…at all.  And I’ve been guilty of it. 

If you want to work with a designer, then do it, but don’t hand them your finished product and ask them to make it pretty.  Make them a part of the process and have them help identify the right UI/UX for the application.  I realize it isn’t easy and sometimes isn’t possible to always have a designer, but when you have that need, just make sure you respect the trade or don’t be surprised if you get this book in the mail.  Take a moment and learn what makes good design.  For a start, watch Robby’s session from MIX08: Design Fundamentals for Developers.

I’ve got it off my chest…and I leave you with this:

Cheers.

Today (19 Oct 2009) the Visual Studio team released the second beta for Visual Studio 2010 to the public.  This is a significant milestone for the team and a huge improvement over the previous beta in my opinion as a user.  As a developer, you can find out how/when you can download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2 from here.

After installing the tools, one thing you may notice right away is a different look of branding of Visual Studio going forward for now.  Gone is the beloved multi-colored infinity looking thing (that’s what I call it at least) and enter the updated logo.

I’d encourage you to download it when you can (MSDN Subscribers can do that today, general availability on Wednesday, 21 Oct) and start playing around with it.

What’s new for Silverlight developers in VS2010?

Well, the good news is no more work around hacks to get Visual Studio 2010 working with Silverlight development!  So what happens now when you install.  Here’s my experience from a clean machine (no existing SDKs, nor any version of Visual Studio as well).

After install of Visual Studio 2010 I have this for Silverlight development:

• Visual Web Developer
• Silverlight 3 SDK
• Silverlight 3 Tools (build 40818, the latest)

A few things missing here:

• Silverlight Toolkit (see below for the update to get)
• .NET RIA Services

See below to get the October 2009 release of the Silverlight Toolkit to get all that goodness and support for VS2010.  Remember the installer for the toolkit also gives you the option to deploy the source (which you still have to unzip) which is EXTREMELY helpful in understanding how controls work in general as well as extending the controls to fit your own needs.

For .NET RIA Services, we don’t yet have a supported build for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.  More information on this will be coming so make sure to subscribe to my feed here for updates and watch the forums.  I’m seeing if I can work on publishing a potential work around for RIA Services users and will post an update here if I can.  UPDATE: View information about RIA Services roadmap and VS2010 from the team here.

After installing VS2010 though, you can start developing your Silverlight applications and use the editable designer surface as well.  Expression Blend will still be your friend for Visual State Manager editing and animation recording, in my opinion.

Making the designer have some better performance

For beta 2, there is a registry entry you can add (we did say it was beta right ;-)) to make the WPF/Silverlight designer perform better. 

NOTE: Editing your registry can be dangerous if you aren’t familiar with it.  It can cause wars, harm children and hurt your machine.  You’ve been warned.

To enable this, perform these steps with all instances of Visual Studio shut down:

1. Open regedit.exe using admin permissions (on vista/win7)
2. Navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 key
3. Right-click and add a new Key named “ClrHost”
4. In the new key, right-click and create a new DWORD32 with the name of StartupFlags
5. Set the value of StartupFlags to 5
6. Close regedit and use Visual Studio as you normally would

I’ve also made a reg file to make this easier.  You can download this file: Dev10DesignerFix.renametoreg and rename it to .reg and double-click it to get this entry.  I chose to force you to rename to .reg so you know what you are doing :-).  This is a step that will not be necessary in the final release version.

Silverlight Toolkit October 2009 Release

Additionally today, the Silverlight Toolkit published the October 2009 release of the bits.  Primarily this was for support of Visual Studio 2010 integration, but also includes drag-drop support for key controls as well as some charting and other API improvements/fixes.  You can read the full details of the release of the toolkit here and download the latest build.

Hopefully you all have a chance to start working with Visual Studio 2010.  I am looking forward to using the new IDE and features to help me be more productive!

Yesterday, the Silverlight Live Streaming team (SLS) posted an update on their blog regarding the future of the Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service.

SLS was a beta service to users to have a place to host and deliver their Silverlight-based applications or media to be delivered by Silverlight players.  It was launched at the time of Silverlight 2 as a free beta service to users under the Windows Live brand and offered 10GB of free storage to beta users.

In summary, the SLS service is being discontinued.  Effective immediately no new account sign-ups are going to be permitted for the service.  Existing accounts are not going to be deleted, nor is the content at this time.  A date for final termination of the service has not yet been set and the team has stated they will provide ample time to users to get their content out of the service.

Is there a replacement, if so, what is it?

A new Windows Azure based service for hosting and delivery of similar content is planned to be launched by the end of 2009 and would be a service that SLS users might consider transferring to, however is not a direct replacement of SLS.  Windows Azure is a broader initiative for the company and this is just one service that will be offered as a part of the suite of Azure cloud services.  Windows Azure is a pay service and will have costs associated with use.

How can I get my content?

The SLS team blog post has information about how you can retrieve your content from the service.  In a nutshell, we’ve enabled the WebDAV folder support for users of the service.  This gives you the ability to map a drive to your account and move files in your file explorer utility.  The key pieces of information you will need to accomplish this is your SLS Account ID and Key.  These are different then your Live ID account you use to log into the service.  To retrieve these, log into your account at the SLS site and click on Manage Account in the SLS options on the left after logging in, like this:

Make note of these two things.  The blog post has instructions on how you can use this information to map a network drive or network location to a WebDAV URL or share location to access your content.  I’m guessing the servers might be under some heavy load using this method so please be patient.  Remember that any authentication prompt is not looking for your Windows Live ID, but rather the SLS Account information noted above.

Summary and some FAQ

Yes, this is a bummer the service is going away as-is.  While the service was meant to stream any stand-alone Silverlight application, I know a lot primarily used it to host video content for blogs, etc. because of the web player it automatically generated. 

Q: Will the new Azure service enable video streaming and Smooth Streaming?
A: I think SLS had one of the most misleading names we’ve had on a product.  The video content on SLS was never really streaming in the technical sense.  It was always just a progressive download experience.  The Azure service details have not been completed for public detail just yet and will be announced when available as to what they will provide, costs and other details.

Q: What about the advertising platform?
A: Users who opted in and were approved for the advertising pilot with AdCenter will still have their AdCenter account information and content.

Q: When will you delete my content?
A: The final dates of discontinuance haven’t been determined and the team will give notice to all users (via the registered Windows Live ID account information/email and the blog) of timelines when they are available.  I would recommend to start downloading/saving your content now if you want it for later…this will save any mad rush to get content.

Hope this helps clarify anything but please also read the full announcement from the SLS team themselves.

If you’re a pro Silverlight developer, this post isn’t for you.  Just a brief update that I’ve updated some of our getting started material for beginners – those who really haven’t done anything.  These will be showing up on the Silverlight Community Site soon, but I wanted to post a link to it here first.

Getting Started with Silverlight Development is a 7-part series where I aim to do my best in trying to stuff as much as possible about Silverlight development in a simple application we develop at different steps.  It uses:

• Navigation
• Styles/templates
• Data Templates
• Data binding
• Value Converters
• Silverlight Toolkit controls
• Isolated Storage
• Network connectivity
• Web service requests to a public service
• Out-of-browser experiences

I hope that it is simple enough for beginners to follow but also provide a broad spectrum of capabilities to the beginner.  Full code in C# and Visual Basic is provided.

Hope this helps!

Over time a few people have contacted me about the missing WatermarkedTextbox from Scott Guthrie’s Digg sample for Silverlight he created a while back.  I had posted the updated code and binaries for WatermarkedTextbox here for you to use if you wish. 

NOTE: Incidentally this is the same code that is actually in the DateTimeTextBox that is included in the Silverlight Toolkit if you just want to use that :-).

After thinking about it though, I decided to take a stab at updating this getting started guide for new developers to Silverlight to incorporate some new features.  This isn’t for you folks that have already got your feet wet.  This is the Hello World –> have something complete in a few steps crowd.  Does it use Prism or MVVM?  No, not yet.  I think I wanted to keep simplicity to help people get started and then refactor from there.

Here’s the breakdown that I created (similar to Scott’s original flow):

• Part 1: Really getting started – the tools you need and getting your first Hello World
• Part 2: Defining UI Layout – understanding layout and using Blend to help
• Part 3: Accessing data – how to get data from where
• Part 4: Binding the data – once you get the data, how can you use it?
• Part 5: Integrating additional controls – using controls that aren’t a part of the core
• Part 6: Polishing the UI with styles and templates
• Part 7: Taking the application out-of-browser
• Watch a video of these steps for a walk-through: Twitter Search Monitor Video Tutorial

I hope this helps some folks and refreshes our getting started content for the newbies!  I’m also going to try to refactor this simple application a few times to help learn the Model-View-ViewModel approach to XAML development so be sure to subscribe to my feed for updates.