Random Musings on Technology
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Jun 15, 2007Writing XAML-based applications is annoying right now. Expression Blend is a User Interface design tool that shares much in common with other common design tools like PhotoShop or After Effects, only it produces XAML. Unfortunately it doesn’t do code… at all.
VisualStudio is a powerful and well-established code development environment, that pretty much any developer could use. Unfortunately it barely handles XAML.
This means you not only have to switch between applications to develop your programs, you have to switch mental modes. In one mode you need to be a code monkey. In the other mode you have to be a graphic designer. I guess if you had one person to do each of these jobs, this would be ideal. But when you’re the lead developer on a project, this means you have to learn how to change between modes quickly.
Speaking of VisualStudio, SuperJason encouraged me to encourage our boss to spring for a license of ReSharper. I’ve rarely been so pleased with a purchase made on my behalf with someone else’s money. ReSharper helps you refactor whole solutions, automagically renaming classes, namespaces and variables. It suggests corrections for your code, and helps you identify redundancy. And it cleans up your “using” statements like magic. It’s a fantastic add-on to VS2005, and well worth spending your employer’s money on.
And just so that this post isn’t devoid of Mac Geekery, in about an hour I’m going into a conference room where we’re meeting with Microsoft. I intend to demo my new .Net 3.0 application on my MacBook Pro — with Parallels in Coherence mode, so that they can see my OS X desktop and weep.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:24 am
I hope he doesn’t cry too much.
June 15th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Yes world, we gave birth to this guy and we still don’t know what the heck he is talking about. At least we had the good sense to get out of the way and let him learn!
June 15th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Haha, I’m with your dad on this one (about the not knowing what the heck you’re talking about; not the giving birth part. that’d be creepy!)