Reformat and Vista complete installation – check. Drivers for LAN to connect to the net? Incompatible. Installing wireless for now…

The last few days I’ve been tinkering with a few of the tutorials over the web and its been interesting, but I found myself really missing having the string of projects one after another.

I plan to take the screensaver which I created and make it something more, but that will come with time. I have a really awesome idea for it but I don’t want to give too many details at this point in time. Quite possible that things will change while I work on it.

What I started to realize was that I was a bit hooked on going through the book and doing the hands-on projects, and I wanted more, so I started looking around. I read reviews regarding books on blend and they just weren’t exactly on par with what I was looking for, and neither were the ones on C# – at least not at this stage.

But then I found a book which seems almost a natural progression from the one which I just completed. Interestingly enough, its by the same publishing company.

The Book: Foundation Silverlight 2 Animation, by Jeff Paries.

The reviews are very similar to what I felt regarding the Blend 2 book – author doesn’t assume you already have high levels of knowledge, and progressively directs you through topics as they get more complex.

So once I reformat my computer and install vista (decided to upgrade from windows XP), I’ll start going through this new book and I’ll be sure to blog my brains out about it chapter after chapter.

After blogging about this book over the past two weeks, I feel that it would only make sense to give a final review of my overall feeling regarding the book, Foundation Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight, by Victor Gaudioso.

The book starts the reader off without any assumptions regarding the reader’s past experience. If a person is interested in going through the book, that person will likely already have the qualifications to understand its contents. As long as the person going through the book is able to take direction coupled with the ability to be self motivated, I think that many people will find this book to be an easy read – which is saying a lot for a book which sits among others which are often dry and difficult to get through due to their nature as being technical oriented.

The progression of the book from chapter to chapter is well paced, starting easy with a bang to draw the reader in, and later becoming challenging, but not impossible to accomplish. Just as the reader passes the middle of the book, the difficulty raises ever-so slightly, but not too far where the reader is thrown off.

The very last chapters are well placed as they are essentially review over the entire contents of the book. These chapters concrete the reader’s newly acquired abilities while adding a touch of more difficulty to keeps the reader moving forward because they continue to learn more even to the end.

Finally, once one has gotten through the book, I’m left with the feeling that these 15 chapters are only the tip of the iceberg, that I can either obtain further knowledge through other books, or chart out on my own. The author on several occasions lists his email address for the readers to contact him, and I’ve discovered that unlike other authors, he actually does respond and is interested in what the reader is accomplishing, instead of having an assistant or someone else pat the reader on the head.

The only criticism that I truly have for the contents of the book is on the level of the User Experience. Throughout the book the author steps the readers through the creation of a multitude of custom controls, buttons and the like, but never steps the reader through a complete button as most users are comfortable with seeing, where the button or control interacts when hovering or clicking upon a button. That being said, there are several occasions where the author leads the reader through areas where the reader can locate and discover how to do such a task on their own. The book reads as a very complete well rounded book, save for that one lack, and for that, I find myself feeling that the inconsistency is uncharacteristic when compared to the solidarity which the rest of the writing presents.

Regardless, I much enjoyed reading the book. The author’s personality shined through the book from cover to cover and gave the sense that he was talking to the reader, as opposed to at the reader.

Information regarding this book and its contents can be found at WindowsPresentationFoundation.com.

Ariel Leroux
FacingBlend.com

There are a few things that I’m going to try at this point.

Since I was unable to complete the last part of Chapter 9 before and was planning on returning to complete it, I’ll do that now – but using only Visual Studio, since i’m locked out of Blend for the time being.

I’ll see how far I can get with that.

The other plan which I have is to download Expression Design and create a few screensavers.  My husband asked me if it was possible to create one with WPF and I figure that it should absolutely be possible – in a Win32 application, if you can create a keyframe animation which was an executable, you just rename the .exe extention to .src with a few additional properties added to the code.  There is a little more to it, but not by much.  I honestly do not think there would be too much more to it, so I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes.  It’ll probably just be something incredibly simple, but if I can create it, I can create any type of screensaver.  I know of a few businesses that institute standardized screensavers across the entire company while removing access for the users to have their own personal settings, with the premise where they think it looks nice to see all screens the same – professional.  There is always a way to take something which could be considered as “frivolous” in a time where LCDs have become so incrediblly commonplace, and turn that frivolity of an item into something business-level professional.

I’ll blog with the results when I get there – blend being inaccessible is just giving me a new challenge to overcome.  I think I’ll embrace it until I can find a solution to my predicament with blend.

Update: The project at the end of chapter 9 was a synch to finish after having gone through the much more complex version of this in Chapter 12, so now onward to creating a WPF screensaver!

I decided that though these last 2 chapters were not quite correct, that I’d try them anyway, and see if I can wade through it by letting intellisense inform me of what I can or cannot do and from there, work with the debugger if I ran into any problems.

Seemed like a good idea, except for 1 important thing: My version of blend on my laptop was the full version of Blend 2.0 and it doesn’t include support for Silverlight 2, only 1.  Not to dispair though, I thought.  I’d noticed on the expression blend website that an SP1 update was available which gave Silverlight 2 support.

I downloaded it, installed and opened my updated Blend to have it report that my trial was expired.

Trial?  Wait a minute here.  My version was a full x86 version!

Attempt to uninstall causes the installer to crash.  An attempt to repair causes the installer to crash.

… I see only 2 options:

Manually hop through my regedit and update everything by hand.

Backup my data and install a fresh version of windows.

I’m now locked out of blend from my PC and my Macbook. *sigh*