Developers on Better Design, User Experience and Why It Matters

The PDC BOF team is pleased to announce another Birds-of-a-Feather session.

Developers on Better Design, User Experience and Why It Matters

What is the return-on-investment of building better User Experiences (UX)?
How does User Interface (UI) design affect your business?

Come join the discussion on why User Experience matters and how it applies to the real world.

In the current world of web 2.0 and with talk of design being important, help us understand why it matters to you and what we get out of good User Interface design. Let’s talk about the technologies on the web and on the desktop that do and don’t support the development of well designed applications, and how we can apply better practices to our own projects. Equally important, let’s discuss how we can bridge the typical gap in cross discipline team dynamics.

Tell us about your secret sauce or just listen to what others have to say. From great enabling technologies like Silverlight or WPF to tried and true web development in ASP.NET using MVC, everyone has a story to tell about UI and design in the Microsoft world.

http://www.pdcbof.com/post/220173613/bof-session-developers-on-better-design-user

Finally a Simple MVVM in Silverlight

So a week or so ago I ran across this article/post by Jeremiah Morrill (MVVM-for-Tarded-Folks-Like-Me-or-MVVM-and-What-it-Means-to-Me.aspx ) was agasp that some spent the time to make MVVM so understandable. What will I do now that everyone can understand MVVM? I pinged Jeremiah and he was open to making this a framework on codeplex seeing as there are only 35 versions of MVVM frameworks out there already albeit no matter how good they are they usually include bits that have todo with 5 or 7 other design patterns so lets take a look at building an MVVM app with just the Simple Framework for MVVM. To start with the Simple framework consistes of one class with three lines of real code:

public class TardViewModelBase : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

public void InvokePropertyChanged(string propertyName)
{
var e = new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName);
PropertyChangedEventHandler changed = PropertyChanged;
if (changed != null) changed(this, e);
}
}

I know I know its a work of art but this really is all you need. Now using this class is just as simple to create an MVVM application using the simple framework. First create a model class like so:

public class AModelClass
{
// super easy version
public string SomeValue { get; set; }
}

ok so maybe also make it return some data magically. Next you need to create your complex view model class that inherits from ViewModelBase like so (WARNING: this is the complicated part...)

public class AViewModelClass : ViewModelBase
{
private AModelClass MyModel;

public AViewModelClass()
{
MyModel = new AModelClass();
}

public string SomeValue
{
get { return MyModel.SomeValue; }
set
{
if (MyModel.SomeValue != value)
{
MyModel.SomeValue = value;
InvokePropertyChanged("SomeValue");
}
}
}
}

So now we have a model that returns some data and then we have our view model that we can bind do. Now to create a View (ie user control) with xaml akin to this:

>UserControl.DataContext<
>Simple:AViewModelClass /<
>/UserControl.DataContext<
>Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"<
>TextBox Text="{Binding SomeValue, Mode=TwoWay}" /<
>/Grid>

If you really like you can get extra complicated and load view in shell or whatever in Xaml like so:

>simple:AViewClass /<

so some other fancy thing... but that is all it takes to have some Model View View Model going on. Nice simple...

http://simple.codeplex.com/

stay tuned for maybe commanding for tards...

Silverlight Hack of the Week - Auto Zoom

Justin Angel did a tweet about this and I must admit its cool and I had never even thought out this before but you can set autozoom and on zoom event in silverlight for when the browser host supports zoom on a page.

AutoZoom
Auto zoom is the simplest. hook this up in the html and this the silverlight control will be able to be zoomed as the browser zooms.

<param name="enableautozoom" value="[bool (ie true or false for the tards that dont know what a bool is]"/>

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd833074(VS.95).aspx

on zoom
so if you are using the first feature you can also then have an event handlers to do something special on zoom. the on zoom html param allows you to define an event handler on such.

<param name="onzoom" value="[functionname]"/>


http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd833068(VS.95).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.interop.content.zoomed(VS.95).aspx

all in all some simple hacks that are not so much hacks but just kind of obscure things in Silverlight.