Enter Sparkle

I just can't get enough of the UX enhancements. Cider, the Visual Designer for XAML is brilliant. However, with the release of Microsoft Interactive Designer (aka Sparkle) CTP for January 2006, designers can get excited too. Firstly, don't be fooled by the design environment that looks a lot like Macromedia Flash. Sparkle is totally different. Its not just draw, drag and drop. The ability to zoom not just the scene you are drawing, but also the design/development environment panels is truely remarkable.

Secondly, anyone using the Interactive Designer must take into account the object hierarcy that is formed when you create an object or UI element on the scene/window. This entails that you explicitly activate a drawn element by double clicking it in the timeline panel (NOT on the design surface), and then droping another element onto it, to make the latter the former's child in the hierarchy. This hierarchical element tree allows child elements to be bound to a field in a data context bound to the parent element, instead of having to create and bind individual data contexts for elements.

Lastly, designers and developers can work on the same project using different development environments, i.e. VS 2005 (with WinFX installed), and Sparkle interactive designer. Although, coding support is available in Sparkle, it was never built for development, just for designing.

After playing around with the Fabrikam Catalog Application tutorials, I was ready to create a small Contacts application on my own; not exactly rocket science, but a beauty indeed!

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