Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

I’m reasonably sure that my experience so far with WPF and Silverlight is not unique in this respect. Most days (right now) are filled with open IDE’s galore and luckily having lots of memory is cheap. Typically a coding session will see that I have at least one instance of both Expression Blend and Visual Studio open at the same time and usually it’s more.

Behaviours Observed

Invariably I find myself doing nearly all the layout in Expression Blend as I find it’s design time environment far more satisfying for the following reasons:

• The ease in setting properties via the Properties Window
• Setting styles etc in the Resources Window
• The availability of the interaction Window
• Designer View in Expression Blend is far superior (and works)
  • Better Viewing Experience
  • Better Element Navigation Experience
• And setting animations in the Objects and Timeline Window

I have become proficient at flipping between IDE’s in an effort to take advantage of each of their strengths. At any given moment I can be doing some layout in Expression and then quickly flip over to VS.NET to take advantage of intellisense if I want speed in writing XAML by hand. If Expression had intellisense then I must admit that I would spend very little time in VS.NET other than to work on C# code directly.

Now that’s obvious you say! How else could you possibly manage? Well, some people are working exclusively in VS.NET with WPF and I just can’t comprehend how or perhaps it would be better stated that I can feel their pain. Perhaps they are die hard Windows Forms developers who just can’t bring themselves to leaving that IDE or maybe they just don’t have access to Expression Blend? Whatever the case it would prove both slower and far more frustrating to work without Expression Blend in my view. So if your a die hard? Let the VS.NET apron strings down and give Expression Blend a fair go, it’s not a perfect world but I believe it’s the best option for the time being.

I have heard a lot of people express the opinion that both these tools should be rolled into one (namely VS.NET). No prizes for guessing that that’s an opinion expressed by developers! I cant speak for devigners / designers but I am fairly sure they wouldn’t enjoy VS.NET at this stage as it’s really still quite unwieldy for XAML based applications. Personally I am quite happy to work in both IDE’s concurrently however my main wish at the moment is to give Expression Blend intellisense, then it’s safe to say that I will pretty much avoid VS.NET for everything other than C# code files. Version 3 of Blend does offer intellisense and code file editing however the lack of debugging will see us continuing to use both tools for a while yet. You can find a list of the new features here.

I have recently updated with Silverlight 2.0 and Blend 2.0, I also had to downgrade from the Blend 2.5 preview version as it wont work with the current RTM’s. Last thing I installed was the Express Version of CodeRush (which I really love) and now VS.Net seems to be restarting itself a bit too often for my liking and I am really becoming annoyed with not being able to get the XAML view of some (not all) my Silverlight applications. Bizarro World! Apparently the XAML view problem is a VS.Net bug (something to do with styles in the app.xaml file), however it’s worth noting that I can see everything just fine in Blend. I also have Ruby In Steel installed and I did notice some wacky behaviour around that time as well. I really don’t want to do a rebuild, I will report back soon with whatever my research turns up.

Update: 13th November 2008

I removed the Ruby In Steel plugin for VS.Net and the visual XSD add-in, so far so good (for general stability in VS 2008) however I still don’t get a XAML Preview for a complex project with more than about 12 or so views (user controls).

From time to time I have the need to create file types within my BizTalk projects that you would think are pretty obvious, like an plain old vanilla XML file for example. Pretty obvious requirement I would have thought? The number of standard out of the box templates for BTS is not that complete so I decided to address that issue and create a few for myself : here’s how.

Locate the BizTalkProjectItems folder on your development machine, which should be often than not located under your program file folder here:

\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Developer Tools\BizTalkProjectItems

Create your template file (in my case a plain old XML and Text File (the text file for creating flat file inputs).

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<Root></Root>