Category: Facing Blend

2 perspectives on animations

Posted on by ARSpaulding

On one hand, a friend of mine tells me, “Man, don’t even worry about the XAML – just design, use Blend, go crazy. Be artistic.” and on the other hand, I have a different friend who groans at the messy XAML which Blend puts out when using transition Visual state manager Double Spline Animations – he says it reminds him of the splatter which the archaic “MS Front Page” would spew out in HTML format, that there are cleaner ways of doing the same things with far fewer lines of XAML.

I’m SO there with the 2nd guy in relation to MS FrontPage and html. Me being the gal who would create something in photoshop, chop it up, and piece it back together – most of the time without looking up from the HTML, CSS – and all the Divs in between until most of everything was put together to verify that everything was behaving the way that I thought it should with my markup.

That being said – I kind of like the idea of, “Just be creative…” Man… I’d love that. To just… make it happen, and move on. I could get SO many other creations done – OR – spend so much more time on the details of the art! That’s not to say that I don’t already, but what if I had even more time? What greater level of polish could be gained with that additional time?

For all who visit who are in either/or/both worlds – do you have any opinion on this matter? What’s better? Cleaner XAML/Learning the alternative markup which blend 2 doesn’t have in its interface – or – using the VSM and the keyframe animation tools?

Is there a better side?

Anyone have an opinion? Should there be / is there a middle-ground?

5 Designs for each question

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’m watching the video where Bill Buxton is speaking during the key note of day 1 at Mix ’09 and one of the things that he mentions is the need to provide 5 different designs for every question posed by a client.  Worded otherwise, 5 different potential solutions to fit the needs requested. 

He continues forward showing a very crazy basic example of transition states using post-it-notes to portray his point.  But I wanted to articulate here a bit of a prerequisite to be able to do the mentioned 5 different possibilities.

Many of my design peers, however they start out in design, whether it be by going through college, by necessity because their employer saw something in them that they didn’t necessarily see for themselves and so they sort of just ended up happenstance in the design field, or because they’ve been seeking and studying design out of a pull in that direction and thrive on it – whatever the case may be, in order to come up with 5 variances to a single design request, one must have exposure to possibilities.  It is far too frequent that a layer of tunnel vision is placed over the eyes and ideas of someone in design, because that’s how the clients have requested things time and time again.  To break out of that, one must look at many other’s work or even see everything in life as a possible thing to be put into design.  Its not all drop-down menus from the top, yet most programs created today have just that.

To create these 5 variations, one must have obtained the experience either by going through the motions on the fly themselves for years and years of design, or they must go out and look at every range of programs from the gamer’s favorite game, to the college student’s final project and even watch the transitional effects seen in movies and commercials and then use every element, every visual stimulation, the bad and the good, and use that as a cue – apply the inspiration to the quick designs.

For someone like Bill Buxton who’s been in design for years, that could be easy.  But what about the newly graduated college student?  Lets hope that there is forgiveness and someone on the front lines to initiate these design concepts to the client while the design infant assists with implementation to allow them to see and experience the various differences in design put forth by the more advanced designer.

ASP.net hosting – post Vista installation

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Crazy thing that I’ve been putting off diagnosing – the inability to debug/test without debugging since the installation of vista on my home PC.

I could debug on my other computers, so I just would switch to them, but today I finally decided to see what I could do about the issue.

What I was experiencing was somehow a sort of lack of connectivity to the host, even though it was on something similar to: Localhost:50234/default.html

Cannot connect to self?  That’s odd.

My thoughts were beginning to come around to the memory of the initial setup of the development tools onto the computer.  The .net framework was already part of the installation which had a 2-sided thought process to me, that’s either really cool or really not so cool.

Everything else installed cleanly without issues, so I just moved along.

I’ve finally come to the conclusion that there’s something to the installation that is not included by default with windows vista – and that would be some of the base administrative tools, including IIS for local hosting of web services.

Sure enough – I am finding that I need to add that as an additional feature.

So if you are having the same issue where you are testing your silverlight application or ASP.net site from Visual Studio, and IE reports that it cannot connect, then head over to the control panel, open the programs and select the “Turn Windows features on or off” and get IIS.  While doing that, don’t forget to enable various features, such IIS Management console, WWW Services, and the various IIS6 management settings.  Just selecting the box for IIS won’t install the necessary items needed for serving localy hosted ASP.net services.

 Update: I still wasn’t able to get anything to run from Visual Studio.  I could go straight to localhost/ and see that IIS 7 was running, but anything at all run using the ASP.net Dev Server would return a failed connection attempt.  *sigh*

Finally I located information regarding a recent response made by Microsoft to a high threat trojan.  Their response was to wipe out the IP address information of the LocalHost.

So to fix this, I located and modified the hosts file.  In most computers, this should be in %windowsdir%>system 32>drivers>etc>hosts.  Updated it in a notepad entry and added the local host IP back to this file to result in 127.0.0.1 as instructed by Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center’s article.

Testing… YAY!  My silverlight apps now run!