Is there any benefit to Blend for WPF business applications?

Question

Hello,

I am developing a WPF application (my first), and am trying to find the fastest and most efficient ways to code. At the moment, I am doing all the design and data binding in Visual Studio 2010, and all seems OK.

I have a copy of Blend, and have been looking a little at it, to see if it offers me any benefits. So far, it looks like it doesn't offer me anything that VS doesn't have, mainly because I'm dealing with data, grids, binding and so on. If I were doing animations and fancy graphics, then maybe it would be useful, but for business stuff, I haven't seen anything.

Have I missed something? If VS offers all I need, then there's no point in me wasting my time looking at Blend. On the other hand, if Blend has something to offer, I might as well take advantage of it.

I would be grateful for any comments. Please understand that this is not in any way a criticism of Blend. I freely admit that I know very little about it. I'm genuinely interested in seeing if it has any benefits for people developing pure data-driven business applications.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

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If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 1

You're right. With VS 2010 there are almost every property/methods etc implemented as they are in Blend.
In VS 2008 the support wasn't that good for WPF applications.

I also now uses Blend almost for doing some Gradient and Animation stuff.

Answer 2

hello

I'll give you a simple answer without further

Tools pada design blend . example :
make a gradient in a rectangle .
ojetos placement on screen
detailed properties of each object
excellent resource 3d
to make animations of objects
triggers the blend is much better
and you can do it all
without writing one line of code
try to do everything in VS

Now put a textbox a grid
and 3 buttons ..

i do not even need the blend .

Answer 3

Hello Rafael,

Thanks for your answer. If you read my original question, you'll see that I specifically said that I'm not doing animations and fancy graphics. I'm doing a data-driven business application (and imagine I always will!), so gradients, 3D, animations and so on are of no relevance to my question. I don't know what triggers are, so i can't comment if that is relevant to me or not.

So from your reply, it sounds like you would say that for my usage, Blend doesn't offer any benefit. All the data binding I've seen so far with VS and WPF can be done in VS without writing a line of code.

Thanks again.

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If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 4

Thanks for the reply. I presume you only use it for gradients and animation then, not for the standard business stuff?

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If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 5

You seem to be confused. Blend is for working with the UI - If you're not doing any sort of UI work, of course you wouldn't use it. Take a look at MS's designer/developer work flow, it will help you better understand what each tool is for and how they can be best used.

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Leon Terry
TFK Labs

Answer 6

Hello Mr Yossu

work with VS and blend together as I work with three dimensional designs and
who require more knowledge about the blend
now about what you said is totally right
continuity in VS because all the standard features of the blend busines VS have and is much better


even more

Answer 7

I could well be confused! As I said, I only just started looking at Blend.

I realise that it is for the UI, but even a data-driven business application needs a UI. My question was, does Blend offer me anything that VS doesn't for designing a UI for my kind of app? So far the answer seems to be no.

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If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 8

Hello!


VS offers more features than the blend is not nothing better to blend in
  more on the visual aspect surely dominates the blend

sorry for the misunderstanding I am not fluent in English

bye

Answer 9

Hi Mr. Yossu,

I want to preface my remarks by saying that while I am a Blend MVP I am a Developer, not a Designer.  As a developer I love Visual Studio: it's the best IDE ever and I couldn't do my job without it.  That being said, I would rather have my finger nails removed with a pair of pliers than to create WPF or Silverlight apps without Blend.

Simply put, Blend is better at what it is intended to do: craft UI and UX.  I use VS to code and Blend to design.  VS may be capable of the tasks you are doing today but in the long run Blend is faster and easier.  (I say in the long run because there is a learning curve)  And when you decide to move beyond the old Battleship gray look and feel Blend wins hands down.  And you don't have to get visually fancy to see the benefits.

I use Blend for Layout, Data Binding, Styling, and UX (like Behaviors).  As you mentioned, VS is OK for these tasks but Blend is way better.  Even if you aren't interested in anything visual I would still give Blend a serious look for Data Binding, Behaviors, and the Objects and Timeline panel.  I find the Data Binding experience in Blend to be superior to VS: better discovery, drag and drop binding, element to element binding, the element picker, etc.  I don't see a way to use Behaviors in Visual Studio without typing the XAML, so right away I would avoid that approach.  In Blend you can add Behaviors with drag and drop: set a few properties and you are off and running with no code.  The O&T makes navigating deep hierarchies much simpler and is a lot easier to navigate than full blown XAML.  It also makes tasks like moving/reordering elements, grouping elements, and changing container types a breeze.

All in all I think it is a mistake to view Blend as only for Designers.  Yes, it is for the design function, but developers can get a lot of mileage out of Blend.  If you give it a chance I think you'd agree.  Feel free to ping me along the way at {joelcochran AT gmail.com}.  Here is a set of Blend presentations I did last summer over Live Meeting, they may help you out some: http://www.joelcochran.com/bor/All-BOR-Videos.zip (About 120MBs)

Cheers!

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-- Joel Cochran, MCTS (WinForms, WPF) Expression Blend MVP INETA Community Champion http://www.developingfor.net

Answer 10

Hi Joel,

Wow, what a great answer! Right now a lot of it doesn't make too much sense to me as I'm very new at WPF, so don't really know anything about behaviours, but it looks like you are giving me things that are useful to me, rather than ideas that are useful for people doing more entertainment-oriented GUIs.

I'm just downloading those videos now, and will take a good look. I daresay I'll be back when I've got more into this.

Do you know of any other resources for learning what Blend can do for me. Whilst I'm very grateful for the link, I don't really like video (haven't the patience) and work well with articles. If you know of anything that will ease me in gently that way as well, I'd be really grateful.

Thanks again

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If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 11

I have just breezed through the replies after reading the original post. I am more on the design side but I teach developers on a regular basis who ask this question frequently. The big reasons why you want to use Expression Blend for business apps is as follows:

Visual State manager...Changing the visual look and feel of your application with user interaction is huge in business applications and extremely logical and easy to create in Expression Blend using the States panel.

Customizing the view of data by editing the ListBox, DataGrid and other control templates. Again, I am not a developer, but most say that it is benefit to have Expression 'Blend in order to customize the look of their data.

You have much better control over the look and feel of an application using the Layout Controls in Expression Blend. You can visually align, set up rows and columns in grids, and switch from one container to another with a simple right-click.

You can create quickly create custom controls and then save them into a resource dictionary to be used in your present app, or referenced in other multiple apps.

Hope that helps!

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Jennifer Smith

Answer 12

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for the reply. Between you and Joel, I can see I've a lot to learn! At least you've given me some pointers for the things that will be of use to me.

Thanks again

---

If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 13

Hi Mr Yossu,

For those that like video I highly recommend Total Training's Blend series taught by my friend Dante Gagne, a PM on the Blend team. I bought this back in v1 and it was a huge help to me.  They recently released version 4.  Check it out at http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/microsoft/expression.asp   NOTE: I do not receive anything for promoting this, it's just a darn good product and you couldn't ask for a more knowledgeable teacher than Dante!

As for articles you'll just have to dig around the web.  There are plenty of interesting articles and posts about solving specific problems but I'm not sure what to recommend as far as start-to-finish type learning.  For that, you may want to check out http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox/ , I've heard some really good things about it (and their PathListBox tutorial is great!)

Finally I'll share a secret with you: I'm writing a book for Manning "Expression Blend in Action: a developer's guide".  This should be officially announced soon and the MEAP should be available in the coming month or so.  Once the MEAP is out you can actually get the chapters as they are written instead of waiting for the entire book to be finished.

Thanks!

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-- Joel Cochran, MCTS (WinForms, WPF) Expression Blend MVP INETA Community Champion http://www.developingfor.net

Answer 14

Hi again Joel,

Thanks for the reply. As I mentioned in an earlier reply, I actually don't like video. Having said that, I found watching you click things in the videos you linked earlier was very helpful. I've got through the first two videos, and already have more of an idea how to use Blend, and why I would want to.

One of the main problems I had searching for info on Blend was that most of it is aimed at designers, not developers.

Any idea when your book will be out? I've looked at a few Blend books, but they also seem to be mostly aimed at designers, not developers. One thing I liked about the two Blendorama videos I saw so far was that you concentrated on stuff that's interesting to me, like data binding and so on. My customers aren't bothered for dancing ferrets and animated windows, they want to see their data and change it!

Thanks again

---

If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 15

Yeah, I only mentioned the video for others following this thread :-)

The book should be available on MEAP in the next month or so, I think the print publish target is this fall.  I definitely relate to waht you are saying, and the focus of my book is Blend from the Developer's perspecitve since that's what I am :-)

I'll be sure to post links to the MEAP when it is available.

Thanks!

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-- Joel Cochran, MCTS (WinForms, WPF) Expression Blend MVP INETA Community Champion http://www.developingfor.net

Answer 16

Mr Yossu contacted me offline and mentioned that the projects would be very helpful for following the videos, so I'm adding this in case anyone wants to download them as well.

http://www.joelcochran.com/bor/BOR-Day2-DataBinding.zip

http://www.joelcochran.com/bor/BOR-Day3-StylesAndTemplating.zip

http://www.joelcochran.com/bor/BOR-Day4-Animations.zip

http://www.joelcochran.com/bor/BOR-Day5-AdvancedTopics.zip

I'm not sure how long these will be available, so download them soon if you want them.

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-- Joel Cochran, MCTS (WinForms, WPF) Expression Blend MVP INETA Community Champion http://www.developingfor.net

Answer 17

Well, don't know about anyone else round here, but you've made a sale already!

If anyone is looking to learn Blend from a developer's perspective, make sure to download the videos Joel linked earlier. Apart from the poor sound quality (which isn't terrible, just not brilliant), the content is excellent.

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If you're really bored, you could read about my experiments with .NET and some of Microsoft's newer technologies at http://dotnetwhatnot.pixata.co.uk/

Answer 18

Totally agree with you. Can't imagine working with WPF without Blend