design-time writer’s block

After much sweat and toil, we’ve launched not one, but three products aimed at the discerning development shop that need to build non-trivial WPF applications quickly and reliably. Indeed many of the apps we’ve built ourselves, for our customers, leverage these controls, panels and tools. Check out the announcement for the details.

I’ve been privileged to work at IdentityMine at a time when some truly amazing interaction design and end-user experience work has been happening, but it’s always been difficult to showcase that work to others. This is usually because of contractual obligations, but it’s also a logistics problem. Silverlight work is much easier to disseminate; simply install the plug-in and go to a site with good content, but WPF and particularly Surface have more difficult hurdles to get around in order to have others experience work that IdentityMine has done.

To resolve some of this, IdentityMine has set up some good quality videos on a Vimeo channel, which includes our official Reel.  Below is the Surface Promo. Special thanks to Kurt for setting this up!

Something to ease the pain of switching between Visual Studio and Blend. An Intellisense AddIn for Blend!

A well executed, no-nonsense addin, reusing Kaxaml’s intellisense code and hooking Blends ICodeEditor. Well done, Stefan.

My only concern is what happens when a second highly useful addin becomes available. I hope Blend 3 has AddIn management on the table, or perhaps an AddIn Manager addin is in order…

I discovered, much to my surprise, that Blend 2 has the necessary infrastructure to support rudimentary custom extensions.  The extensions take the form of a class which implements the public interface Microsoft.Expression.Framework.AddIn.IAddIn.

Inline is a very simple HelloWorld sample.

AddInDescription("HelloWorld", AddInCategory.Tool)]
public class HelloWorld : IAddIn
{
    public void Initialize(IApplicationService 
      applicationService) {}

    public void StartupComplete()
    {
        // Show we were here
        System.Windows.MessageBox.Show("Hi");
    }

    public void ShuttingDown() {}

    IDisposable Members
}

AddIns are hooked on startup, specified as command line arguments:
path\to\blend.exe /addin:HelloWorld.dll

When initialized, an Application ServiceProvider object reference is passed, which contains accessors to all the major service provider objects of Blend.  Through this, it’s possible to add custom menus and dialogs, possibly even panels, to Blend.

I expect there are alot of limitations.  The most glaring is loading Addins only by specifying them as commandline arguments. Much of Blend is internal and/or sealed, including Nautilus (Blend’s code editor), Visual Studio abstractions for Projects, Solutions, and the Build system.  Enough remains open to allow for some customization of existing features, and certainly for new features.

More discovery needs to be done.