Month: December 2008

Alt-commands in namespace – call me confused

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’m going through the lab at the end of Chapter 3 of Victor’s book – a recap of the steps until now are basically thus:

Create new project, tell the project to include an image in its solution, open the solution into the workspace and  convert it to a 3d object, then rename it to 3DImage.

What Blend automatically does when renaming it, is apply an underscore at the beginning of the name and after the attempt to ‘correct’ this, it reverts back to _3DImage.

In my previous experiences with blend(its actually been a few months since I’d played around in Blend, so I’m truely beginning to wonder if I’m mixing this functionality up with something else), the use of the underscore (_) before any letter or number has been a nice way to allow for the UI to apply an alt shortcut (hotkey).

For example, if I were creating my own browser (if you ever decide to go through some of the more introductory C# development tutorials provided with Visual Studios, the creation of an internet browsing application is something you’ll likely go through.  Visual studios makes it pretty simple to accomplish this type of application), I’d set the menus “File” “Edit” “View” “History” etc. to have hotkeys for those who are interesting in accessing these menus with their keyboard instead of mouse.  To do so, I’d name them “_File” “_Edit” “_View” “Hi_story”, etc.

This will result in the menus appearing in the application as such:

File  Edit  View  History

These would make each item accessible by holding the alt-key down while hitting whichever character is underlined.

So its interesting that Blend is automatically placing an underscore at the beginning of the name.  Alternatively, I recall in the process of designing an interface (which I’m redesigning, but will eventually have available here on Facing Blend) having troubles whenever using a number in my namespace.  It wouldn’t build the application.  However, when replacing the number for the word (1 replaced for One), it would build.

Perhaps this is blend’s self-protection?

Chapter 3 – The Pan Tool

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’m nearly through chapter 3 and I feel the need to take note here in the blog of a few points which I keep finding, forgetting, and finding again – which he mentions in this chapter.

The double-clicking of the Pan tool.

Far too often when I’m working on UI, I zoom in very closely on my objects to make sure that everything is lining up, every detail is perfected, and often I find the answer to the, “I’m not quite sure why, but that doesn’t look quite right – can’t put my finger on it, I just know that its not right.” by zooming in.

All of that sounds great – detail oriented being a rule of thumb of mine, however, there’s 1 issue with zooming in: It often is difficult to get to OTHER objects without zooming out, locating item, and the zooming back in.

Well Expression blend has a nifty thing with their pan tool.  When you double-click on it, your view will center on whatever object it is that you’re clicked upon in you objects bar.

When I’m not remembering that this functionality is there, it drives me nuts trying to remember what it is that I did in the past to make quick moving w/o zooming out.  Hopefully making note of it here will keep it more permanently in my mind.

Btw, if you’re lost – I’m going through Victor Gaudioso’s book on Microsoft Expression Blend and blogging as I go.

Chap 2 *check* Moving right along

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’ve finally completed chapter 2 (didn’t take very long – lots and lots of comments though… ) and I would have to say that I am happy with the book so far.

It maintains my first impressions – that the author is talking to me as opposed to writing a book.  I have a very difficult time getting through books which are so “technical manual” that the words start meshing together like someone who hasn’t a clue how to enunciate.

The final product from chapter 2’s “lab” also included something about triggers that I didn’t know.  I’ve been hand-coding triggers with my very limited knowledge of C# when I could have been using blend to do it all for me.

My conclusion: This book will likely fill in far more blanks than I imagined, when chapter 2 has already brought me to an easier way to do things… though I’m the type of person who somehow always manages to learn something the more difficult way and at some point after, often WAY after, I locate a much quicker, simpler, and easier way to do that same something.

Makes one highly appreciative when you go about learning things that way.

Onward to chapter 3.

Victor's book, Chap 2 – Alert! A discrepency is spotted!

Posted on by ARSpaulding

There is no possible way to actually get through and locate every single error and discrepency in a book. The hundreds of times the author and editors comb through the book and modify things – by the end, I’m sure the entire team feels dog-tired.

However, I’m someone going through the book and using it. My job is to be snobbish, accusatory and unappreciative, as well as blissfully ignorant of the high levels of iterations and reiterations that went into said book. Oh, and I’m supposed to say things like, “I could have spotted this from a mile away” or something to that effect.  I cannot forget the most important part: I must have a high level of grammatical and spelling errors to give a level of poetic irony.

…

I hate doing things that I’m “supposed” to do.

But I will point out 1 mistake/discrepency here and well – I’ll likely point out the others which I come across because its fun that I spotted it and its even MORE fun to tell that I spotted it.

Anyway, in Chapter 2 you’re requested on page 35 to modify your TextBlock size to w: 400px h:100px and in the screenshot of the program where you make these changes, the comments below the screenshot example read:

“Figure 2-19. Changing the Width and Height of your [TextBlock] to 400 and 100, respectively”

Then later, after modifying the foreground colors to be nearly jab-my-eyeballs-out gradients (sorry, I’m not a fan of the standard use of green-white-red gradients for the purpose of tutorials and teaching material. I find that practice to be abhorrent and if you’re going to really go after something that is easily observed, why not go all the way towards horrible colors instead of half way? Use neon pinks or something, it would match the book’s cover too! I hate pink, but going along w/ the theme presented from the cover, let’s take it home all the way, man!! Consistency! Consistency!), you encounter on page 38 the line:

“Because you set your [TextBlock] to the Width of 600 and a Height of 100…”

Wait, I did what?

I didn’t set my text block to a width of 600 – I set it to a width of 400. *twitch*

Ok, its fairly minor, but I’ll go ahead and change my TextBlock to 600 since you said that I already did. Maybe he’s just trying to use “The Secret” on the readers?

Edit: Just after posting this, I continued and almost immediately stopped because I was trying to as closely emulate his “lab” by using the same font-type.  He has in his picture the font-type of “Segoe UI”.  At first glance, that is likely not an issue.  However, when looking through my own listing of fonts, I’m finding that I don’t have said font.  I’m going to make a guess at where this font came from: One of his recent clients!!  I could be wrong, but w/ it having the label of “UI”, I would be willing to guess that this might be the name of the font which is named to assist with quick-reference, and “UI” designates where that font is used.  Woopsy!  The image of the font looks very very similar to Verdana but with slight modifications to make it almost DIN-Medium.

Chapter 2's "Hello World"

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Going through Victor’s book – chapter 2 is fairly short, but the “lab” at the end of it, the typical “Hello World” which is seen, as he mentions in his book, in most every book or introductory guide to programming, application development, and other types – is already a bit obsolete with the releases of later versions and updates to Blend.

Please note: His “Hello World” is not anywhere nearly as boring as many.  He goes through a lot of the basic orientational-use of Blend including gradients, modifying colors, color stop properties, application window resizing, key-frame animations, quick-key uses, and more.  Its more than worth going through.

In his book, he indicates that gradients start out left-to-right, and instead modifies things to go top to bottom.  Unless I’ve modified my default settings (which I don’t recall doing), mine is set exactly the opposite.  The “Gradient Brush” on mine starts from top to bottom, so several parts of the tutorial, including the very eye… catching *cringe* Christmas colored “Hello World”, which gradients from Red to White to Neon Green, will require you to rotate the gradient angle.   Remember, much like Adobe products, holding the shift-key down will maintain true-angles, which assists in obtaining an accurate rotation of exact 90¤.

I have to note that earlier, I asked the “Why?!” of the C: drive for locatino of projects.  I’m beginning to see why he has that as his choice.  For the purpose of this book, having everything held within a root “Projects” directory makes guiding those reading the book, quite easy.  Most who will be using this book who have different preferences will just place things wherever they want anyway, so it really doesn’t matter except for the use of guidance within the book where a person puts items, so long as they know where the file was placed.  Typical document saving 101.

Yes!! Finally through chapter 1!!

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Its about time.  I think this is the 4th or 5th time trying to get through the book, and as mentioned before, something would crop up which prevented me from going through even the first chapter.  The last of which was an entirely different project taking up all my time – which is to say, something entirely unrelated besides by the fact that I was attempting to get through the book just before I started on said project.

So finally – I’ve gotten past the 1st chapter.  The universe has apparently concurred with me and my attempts to further my knowledge.

Yes!

Onward to chapter 2.