Windows Presentation Foundation—Tools for WPF Design Solutions
| CSharp-Online.NET:Articles |
| Windows Articles |
|
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
|
| © 2006 Sams Publishing, Inc. |
Tools for WPF Design Solutions
WPF tools coming out in early 2007 mainly focus on designers. The two tools you want to look for are Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer, both from the new family of Expression tools that also include a web tool.
Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer actually was released in late 2005 to the design community. The focus of Graphic Designer was to give Microsoft something that it didn’t have previously: a serious illustration tool. The feedback among graphic designers is that Microsoft has delivered a solid illustration tool. Figure 3 demonstrates the types of illustrations you can create.
Figure 3 Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer allows you to export professional-quality illustrations to XAML.
While Graphic Designer still lives in the shadow of Adobe Illustrator, it’s clear that this is a solid version 1.0 contender. This time Microsoft isn’t kidding (as we all thought with past Microsoft graphics tools).
What separates Graphic Designer from other graphics tools is its tight integration with the Windows Presentation Foundation. The clearest example of this is taking an illustration such as the one shown in Figure 3, exporting the file as a XAML file, and then being able to import the identical document into any other tool that supports XAML. Figure 4 shows the illustration from Figure 3 in Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer.
Figure 4 A design created in Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer, shown in Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer.
A key element of the Windows Presentation Foundation is interactivity. You can use Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer, a tool designed from the ground up to build interactive XAML solutions, to add animation and objects.
Interestingly, Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer is a complete development environment that builds deployable solutions in much the same way you expect to see with Visual Studio. The difference is that the tool, built with the Windows Presentation Foundation, is flexible and engaging (two words you wouldn’t ordinarily hear applied to Microsoft products).
Future tools from third-party vendors—such as Electric Rain, with its XAM3D modeling tool—continue to hit the market. Certainly, when Windows Vista ships in 2007, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a whole slew of visual tools being released to support XAML.
 
|
