Month: April 2009

Look ma'! I made Simon in Silverlight 2!

Posted on by ARSpaulding

If you’re so inclined, you should join me in doing a happy dance!

Its finally ready! 

Presenting:

Simon, in Silverlight 2!

I’ve had this sitting on the front and back burners for the last… few months (has it really been that long?).  Got the design to my buddy David at HackingSilverlight.net about 3 or 4 weeks ago, he gave it brains and sent it back to me a week later… but in silverlight 3.  What the heck?!

I want the world to actually get to PLAY WITH THIS!!  So I rolled it back to silverlight 2… but there was a problem or 2.  The sounds wouldn’t play, we didn’t have all of the sounds anyway, and the font wasn’t playing nice!

Ugh – and then work.  Why the heck does that thing which makes my life actually operate smoothly have to come into the foreground just when I need some time to do my little projects?!  Geez.  What are these people thinking – do they think they pay me or something to do their stuff?  Oh yeah, right.  They do.

Long story short, its DONE! 

Go!  Click on the picture – it’ll take you there.  Have fun!

…

Oh, and tell me what you think in a happy comment, if you please 😀

Tutorials?

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Seems more and more often, my site is being hit with people looking for Expression Blend Tutorials.

Before I delve into the potential of providing a few, I was wondering if it was possible to elicit feedback on what areas would be of interest?

If you have interest in tutorials, please comment or send me an email at – ariel.leroux at gmail.com

Update to FacingBlend – a tiny portfolio gallery

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’ve been asked quite a few times in the last few months for a display of some of my design work, and though a lot of it, I cannot show, some items are already publicly viewable and/or never made it to being live but can be viewed in a printscreen type of display.

Not only that, but I’d like to have an image gallery set up for… whatever I decide to post up in the future.  Who knows?

Anyhow, you may view items within the portfolio galleries by either clicking on one of the 2 links along the top or right toolbar of this site, or by clicking here.

Font embedding?

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Silverlight 2 stuffs – my “thing” which is “done” has a specialized font and the page.xaml is calling the user control which was created – the User control is the part which is using and referencing the font.

When pulling the joyful information directly from the user control – it displays the font, however, when calling the user control in page.xaml… *erk*(as in the sound a car makes when someone puts on their brakes)!  No font.  It resorts to the User Input darn default.

Ugh.  I’ve watched the Tim Huerert video (probably mispelled that name) and that method works only on the native document or so it seems.  I’ve heard reference of embedding the resource into the DLL but as to how the heck to do that is beyond me…

I’ll keep searching.  I WILL find it!

Fun commenting in c#

Posted on by ARSpaulding

There’s this little piece of FacingBlend that I originally designed just as an icon and my buddy David said, “Hey!  You should make that into the REAL THING!”

So I did – I made it larger.  There were a few things… ok, a LOT of things… that needed to be modified when it was in its larger form, further details and the like, but the base model itself was still near to exactly the same – but then it required more fun stuff, like some level of interactivity, nice animations so that when YOU do something IT does something.

Ok, I’m being vague, and somewhat on purpose because I’m in the middle of “rolling it back” because the crazy guy did it in Silverlight 3 – but oh wait.  Nothing’s supposed to “Go live” in Silverlight 3 according to the SL3 Development site.

So I’m going through some of the C# when I find a comment.

// blow up...

I can’t help it but laugh.  I think that would be one of my absolute favorite things when going through someone else’s work and modifying things.  The little comments that only someone who knows how to go through the stuff will find.

Alternative uses for XAML

Posted on by ARSpaulding

This will be a quick post – but I’m too amused to not share.

I was getting off the phone w/ someone and they mentioned adding a logo to something so that its all tied in and… I did it.

 

I used “XAML” as a verb, in the same way that I’d say, “I’m going to google that” or “Let me really quickly photoshop that.”

I asked him to get me the logo so I can “XAML it”.

Pure – awesomeness.