Let’s do a Pair | The Blend and The Visual Studio
OK..ok this happen in yesterday, as you know the SilverLight 3 is coming as RTW (Release To The Web) you can easily download the offline package here. There are a lot of improvement in developer and designer side, for instance have you feel the Blend 3 intellisense…whoa
Since the UX is the most core-part in nowadays software development, I’m definitely sure that many of you will start the development of SilverLight or WPF start from the Blend. However rather than start a fresh project from a Blend. However, I’m strongly advising you to use Visual Studio as the initial project development. Why? here as the sample
- 08.00 AM , The designer send me a POC of the our new application initialed ZF (not the real name)
- 08.15 AM, I’m firing up the Blend and seeing the structure, and do a compile and yess…it’s work
- 08.20 AM, I’m configuring the storyboard behaviour, .Begin here .Stop there (all the way long)
- 08.45 AM, I need the WCF services as backend .. but wait..the template which is generated by Blend doesn’t support WCF Services page. It’s mean i have to doing some “biolerplates codes” to integrate between the SL, and the WCF and i should also thing about Client Policy domain (hah…security as cross domain layer :p)
- 09.00 AM, not have to think much longer, i’m cloning the SilverLight blend template to the Silverlight VS Template. There are some adventage when using SilverLight VS template such as.
- The template has a WCF template so bye bye Client Side Application Ploicy and bye bye boilerplate config/codes :)
- The template has more reference assemblies
- Visual Studio is a little more tidy in restructuring the project
- 10.00 AM, I’m feeling happy now i’m firing both Blend and VS, Blend for do storyboarding and VS for debugging and coding.
SO? what you can learn from this post, ok i point it up to you
- Starting your “skeleton solution” in Visual Studio since its more comprehensive and “almost” complete. It will be good idea if this kind of task is created by the Solution Architect
- Let’s the designer start the POC from the template, so developer like me doesn’t need to do some project cloning.
- Do the pair, it’s just like Soulmate model, it’s really cool to firing up both VS and Blend, you can’t do this in VS but you can in Blend, vice versa… in Indonesian i said “soulmate itu saling melengkapi”
In the Enterprise solution, you should also try the integration between Blend and VS in TFS area…so happy software engineering… the tools is out there..and hope it can help you to do more efficiently.
Ciao ,
Ridi