Tutorial – Using Blend to Build a Twitter App
Don Burnett has a new blog focusing on WPF, “WPF/E”, XAML and Microsoft Expression Studio. In a post today, he wrote up a small tutorial on using Blend to get information from Twitter in a WPF application. The tutorial gives some good insight into how Blend does databinding, so it’s worth checking out. He plans to go deeper in later tutorials.
I’ve become a bigger fan of Blend since I’ve seen it in action more. There are definitely things that have issues, but for the most part, I think it’s a program with potential. Dave Malouf has some constructive criticism on Blend after attending “Blend Bootcamp” that is valuable. I’ve also been checking out his blog this morning, and there’s good stuff there, so if you’re into Interactive Design, this is a good blog to subscribe to.
Update: Alan Le has an example Twitter app he built using WPF and Blend. Marlon Smith also highlighted some good Lee Brimelow resources in the comments below. Lots of Blend and Twitter info for people on the look out.
[tags]Blend, Twitter, Expression Studio[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
April 7th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Until we can click on a Demo link for these WPF things, does it really matter?
April 7th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Chris Bernard provides a good level set to help designers understand what Blend was built for as a version 1.0 product, while addressing Dave’s and other designers questions and possible misconceptions.
Check it out here
April 7th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Ryan, a better look at the product is demonstrated by Lee Brimelow over on Lynda.com, here.
This just a preview and hopefully Lee will be doing advanced tutorials as well.
April 7th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
More good Lee Brimelow resources here and here.
April 8th, 2007 at 1:03 am
Very cool, thanks Marlon. Those are all pretty good and I hadn’t seen a couple of them.
Eric, I think in this case Don just didn’t have it ready to show. WPF has a lot of “click to demo” options (albeit only on Windows
).
April 8th, 2007 at 2:24 am
On a side note, I used Expression Blend in conjunction with Visual Studio to build my Twitter app.
Ryan, thanks for pointing to another interesting blog to subscribe to. Not sure how he’s gonna show Authenticated http request of the friends timeline with just the XmlDatasource. I had to write a httprequest wrapper just for that.
Marlon, Lee is amazingly good at both doing what he do and explaining it.
April 8th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Alan, I’m sorry I didn’t mention your app. I was thinking about it when I started the post, then got distracted and came back to finish writing it and totally forgot.
I’ll update it to include a link. My bad!