Over the past month or so, I've been dabbling around with Avalon and XAML. Its been really exciting with so much cool new stuff out there. After a few rough and crude set of experiments, I thought I'd try writing a little app that was atleast somewhat polished and pretty-looking (at least as far as my limited design skills would take me as I mimic'd some of the
aero experience) and get a sense of what it takes to do so. The result is a mini-designer to generate bezier spline curves.
The little app allows you to choose the brush characteristics, define transformations, create a little animation, and finally export the results to a .xaml file (
sample generated .xaml file). I wrote the app using the PDC bits. You can
download it to generate your own animated bezier curves. Let me know what you think via your comments. Here are some screenshots as well:
The experience has been an interesting one. I kept wanting to write custom controls for various aspects of the UI (given my asp.net experience I suppose) - but managed to stick to using declarative styles. I am starting to like this new model, but still wonder where do declarative styles, visual trees and visual triggers end and where does a rich set of components come in. Couple of other new things that came along the way - using declarative two-way data-binding with some sort of MVC-ish approach, and using vectors rather than bitmaps for the images. Pretty cool stuff. I am hoping to get the code ready for sharing at some point... maybe as a gotdotnet workspace.
Besides just using a classbrowser on the MSAvalon namespace, some blog entries (by
Nathan Dunlap and Fumiaki Yoshimatsu) really helped:
Looking forward to spending (and finding!) more time to play with this new stuff...
Posted on Thursday, 2/12/2004 @ 10:54 AM
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