Manuel Clement and others - Introducing Sparkle

Those are clearly the coolest radio buttons ever.

(I hope that the guys from the videos will see this question)

How does this work? Is it just like a designer, like the one in visual studio, that we do Windows forms in, but we just get the possibilty to draw some stuff?

Should developers get this tool?

Will we be able to add custom controls(Like custom buttons, or another control that we might want to do), and use them in the program?

One thing, that would be critical, in order for me to buy this cool program, is really that, JUST like in the visual studio designer, that you get this small "grids"(The small lines, that makes you able to place items at a specefic place, compared to other controls), when you resize/moves items.

How about the price? Will normal users, that is just hobbyist, be able to buy this?

Jobs:  And then I want to see the 4th quarter figures for --

(Jobs bows his head, clutches his chest)

Igor: Is everything alright, master?

Jobs:  I just sensed... someone using the phrase "Macintosh-style."  Unleash the lawyers.  Immediately.

Igor: Yes, master.

Very nice.  A lot of the tools for doing visual tweaking seem to be thought out quite well.



Admittedly, this is a bit of topic, BUT after being wowed....

Will there be a programatic way to rasterize XAML and save as a PNG or JPEG?  I'd love to be able to programatically do some XAML data binding to create say a graph or some other type of data visualization and then spit that out as a PNG on my web app.

Chadk wrote:

How does this work? Is it just like a designer, like the one in visual studio, that we do Windows forms in, but we just get the possibilty to draw some stuff?

To me it looks like MS's version of MM Flash, only it exports to XAML instead of swf.
Have to say, it looks very cool.

I'm a little confused after seeing the video and the description. Is Sparkle going to be built into Expression, or a separate project? Will there be a version of Visual Studio with this built in? When will it be released?

Yeah it totally reminds me of the good old days when we used to work with flash for the client ui and create asp pages that output XML.

Now we have this amazing designer tool, my designer friends are going nuts, and a great data store (WinFS)...

So many people pour their lives into their work and now we have the tools that not only let us express our true talents but the platform is huge!

Kudos to the team at MS for making a sick implementation of what so many envisioned but juts couldn't do.

This gave me some motivation to create an article on how to export Alias Maya models to direct (.x) files and use them in your avalon UI.  Just wish I had the Sparkle editor so I could really crang out some results

Kosher,
ThomasGoddard.com

Hmm, I got an error message, that's a first for a Channel 9 video:

C00D11BB: Cannot play the file

Windows Media Player cannot play the file because the specified protocol is either not supported by the Player or not supported by the server.

If you encountered this error by clicking a link on a Web page, the link might not be valid.

If you encountered this error by typing a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the Open URL dialog box, try opening the file by using a different transport protocol (for example, "http:" or "rtsp:").

A list of protocols that are supported by the Player and the correct syntax follows:

• mms://server/filename (for example, a file with a .wma, .wmv, .asf, or .mp3 extension)
• http://server/filename
• rtsp://server/filename
• mms://server/sami.asf?SAMI=http://server/sami/sami_demo.smi (SAMI file)

If Windows Media Player supports the protocol and you still cannot play the content, verify that the Player is configured to use all of its supported protocols.

To configure protocol settings

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Network tab.
2. In the Streaming protocols area, select all the protocol check boxes.

Note

• The supported protocols can be used only to stream digital media files. Windows Media Player cannot be used as a browser.

Error ID = 0xC00D11BB, Condition ID = 0x00000000

I watched the introduction video at http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/demos.aspx and, when they were showing Expression Web Designer, it was Frontpage!  Is Frontpage being renamed/transitioned into Expression Web Designer? Or is EWD a plugin for Frontpage? Or something else...?

Sparkle is one of three tools that form the Expression suite - the other two tools today being a Web Designer for HTML, and "Acrylic" for vector/2D/bitmap gaphics. I suspect a forth photo/image editing  product will come out at some point, but who knows?

Sparkle itself is written entirely in .Net using XAML (I don't think Acrylic or the web designer are). Sparkle is therefore a showcase of the kind of app you could build using the .Net/XAML platform. (Imagine trying to write the Flash authoring tool in Flash, for example - you'd run out of steam pretty quickly).

In this one hour video they really hardly scratched the surface. They didn't show how to make a custom reusable control, or how to create a style, or how to handle rich text. I'm sure these are things that Sparkle will excel at.

I wrote a short post on Sparkle over at http://www.cybergrain.com

Now we just have to wait until it appears in the stores

Sure looked like "Expression Web Designer" was a rebranded Front Page to me. Sparkle, on the other hand, is brand new.

Avalon says:
The hell with Flash!

Hey, Scoble. Video Length: 00:00:00
- Steve

scobleizer wrote:

Sorry about that. The video length is just over an hour. Whew.

When I get downloads working I'll fix that.

No problem, Sparkle rocks, thanks for taking the time to share, Scoble!.. What's next?

- Steve

When Robert Scoble coined the "Shock and Awe" phrase last week, it smelled exactly the same stuff he cooked up prior to PDC 2003 and later apologized for the over hype.

Here is my take on the PDC 2005: PDC 05 is a 3-hour yawn. Like someone in the other thread said, Vista may be impressive for a small company, but MS is a $300 billion monopoly with 60000 employees and virtually infinite amount of money. Why the hell does it take you guys 4 or 5 years to come up with a feature list that's basicly a carbon copy of Tiger and some other ancient Apple technologies?

You guys have to read the horror story: Despicable Microsoft WMP 10 bugs and ask the team to fix them. It's embarrassing.

Wow, now that is cool. It makes a mockery of all the previous Avalon demo apps. Pure .net, pure vector UI, exactly the kind of app I envisioned when I first heard of Avalon and at the same time exactly the kind of app I hoped would be in place to help design them.

I'll definately point some of my designer friends towards this video, They're sure to be impressed. I'll also tell them not to laugh at Manuel's skillz.

So many questions, do the sparkle team have a blog?

Chadk wrote:

(I hope that the guys from the videos will see this question)

How does this work? Is it just like a designer, like the one in visual studio, that we do Windows forms in, but we just get the possibilty to draw some stuff?

Should developers get this tool?

Will we be able to add custom controls(Like custom buttons, or another control that we might want to do), and use them in the program?

One thing, that would be critical, in order for me to buy this cool program, is really that, JUST like in the visual studio designer, that you get this small "grids"(The small lines, that makes you able to place items at a specefic place, compared to other controls), when you resize/moves items.

How about the price? Will normal users, that is just hobbyist, be able to buy this?

Hey there guys! I believe this is my first post on Channel 9

Let me try to answer as many questions as I can...

This is a tool for UI / UX designers - it is specifically made for "us" - because as John and I say in the video: there was *no* tool to allow designers to make *real* UI and be a part of a client app team...

Just like VS is a dashboard on top of Avalon, with tons of tools that are made for devs, Sparkle is a "steering wheel" - only with different set of tools... Devs *can* use it and will enjoy it HOWEVER many of the tools behave in ways designers expect - which can differ from what devs expect.

VS will also have its own set of Avalon tools (including a design surface) sometime in the future... It was shown today and it is called Cider. This is where devs specifically will say "aaaahh myyy tool"

See different users really mean different tools. But again, devs will have fun exploring the WPF/Avalon platform thru Sparkle as well.

Custom controls: YES. Think a dev works on a custom avalon control with a Template property... The DLL or the project with this control can be opened in Sparkle - and you can visually create a new template for the control (if this is what you want to do). In fact, Sparkle itself (read Sparkle's own UI) has all kinds of custom controls, and I can edit those in Sparkle itself (follow me?)

Sparkle will not "mess up" your VS projects (and vice versa)... We share the same exact project format, and the same compiler (MSBUILD).

Price: don't know


Blogs: Look up these names on the web: John Gossman, Amir Khella... There are others, I will link them from my own (new) blog I quickly threw together for the PDC at http://spaces.msn.com/members/manodesign

-mano

PS: hey nice to see you here Jon!

Robert, appealing to a random list of Windows fanboys doesn't even begin to address my issues. I actually agreed with you that Office 12 is pretty cool, although it is really not much more than streamlining an overly complicated UI. What I am not shocked or awed is Windows Vista, which mostly a rehash of Mac OS X Tiger and some ancient Apple technologies. Are you going to admit the inexcusable WMP 10 bugs?

Hi,

Will there be a tool that would allow me to create complex 3D models?

The CDCer wrote:

Robert, appealing to a random list of Windows fanboys doesn't even begin to address my issues. I actually agreed with you that Office 12 is pretty cool, although it is really not much more than streamlining an overly complicated UI. What I am not shocked or awed is Windows Vista, which mostly a rehash of Mac OS X Tiger and some ancient Apple technologies. Are you going to admit the inexcusable WMP 10 bugs?

How can you call it a rehash of OSX Tiger?  OSX does not do hardware accelerated 3d compositing of the desktop.  Apart from the superficial "sizzle" stuff in the UI, there's a ton of under-the-surface stuff that Apple doesn't have.

Even if they did have some of this stuff, from a developer tools perspective you can't really make a comparison.   There is no equivalent to VS.NET, XAML, WPF, WCF, etc. etc. on the Apple platform.

Besides, its a free market and a free country.  If you don't like WMP10 or Vista etc. don't use it!  Go use your Mac and write your apps in AppleScript and be happy.  Life's too short...

Minh wrote:

Hi,

Will there be a tool that would allow me to create complex 3D models?

Check out ZAM3D.

CDCer, the difference between Windows Vista and Mac OS Tiger is that more than 5% of the personal computing community will actually be using Windows Vista.  Microsoft is bringing this technology to the people in that community who don't want to pay for overpriced Apple hardware.

Larsenal wrote:

Very nice.  A lot of the tools for doing visual tweaking seem to be thought out quite well.



Admittedly, this is a bit of topic, BUT after being wowed....

Will there be a programatic way to rasterize XAML and save as a PNG or JPEG?  I'd love to be able to programatically do some XAML data binding to create say a graph or some other type of data visualization and then spit that out as a PNG on my web app.

Yes, you can indeed use WPF ("Avalon") to rasterize/snapshot content and then use our rich imaging functionality to encode that snapshot to BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG and TIFF or others, depending on what codecs you have available. 

If you (or others) have any other questions, another great resource is our Avalon newsgroup ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.avalon&lang=en&cr=US) - lots of people happy to help with any random Avalon questions you may have.

Thanks,
-Adam Smith [MS]

If you are at the PDC conference, there are 2 talks on thursday and 1 on friday which are from the Sparkle team - but the session titles are not obvious and you may miss them on the list:

Thursday at 11:30 in 502AB: Future Directions for building WPF Interfaces (Pete Faraday - TLN213)

Thursday at 1:00 in 403AB: Tips and Tricks - WPF UI Design using a designer tol for WinFX (me - TLN10)

Friday at noon in 515AB: Case Study - what we learned building a WPF designer tool on WinFX (John Gossman - TLN03)

The "Sparkle Interactive Designer" name was basically not public until the keynote Wednesday morning, so the names were not descriptive as printed...

Manuel

Guys! Are you crazy?!?!?!?

Last videos were 400 MB, 500 MB, 600MB... But now 930 MB!!!!

What's next? IMAX? HDDVD? WMVHD? 4,5 gigs for 40 minutes...

This is amazing stuff.  When i first heard of Avalon i really did doubt that Microsoft would get the designers right!  When acrylic came out i was expecting that to be it and did not hold out too much hope for sparkle.  How wrong was i.  After leading teams of developers and graphic designers on projects i really do understand how much use this is going to be.  The increase in productivity and quality of software UX is going to be amazing.

Please hurry and get some CTPs for this out the door.

Looking forward to more PDC videos!

Looks great - but what's the story around source control?

I've had designers in the past working in dreamweaver to mock up html pages, but the process of delivering those to the devs was, well... less than ideal (open up a 3rd app, check out the current build from cvs, hassle the devs to learn how to use cvs again, check into cvs, etc).

I think source control needs to be a first class citizen in Sparkle for it to be really useful in a team environment.

I totally agree with Aran.

Is there any indication when the first code, likely a CTP, will be released? We'd love to provide you with actual use feedback. Even a vague timing idea, such as "early next year", "first half of year", "around launch time of Vista", ...

Erik (HumanCompiler)! - of course I remember you, from Were Here and also... Unreal Tournament I met Qmark at the PDC, he used to be on WH & UT. Small world...

About Source Control:

I use Source Control all the time when working on the Sparkle UI, I think John Gossman talks about it in the video. I am enlisted to Sparkle Source, check files in and out, do code reviews, resolve conflicts, etc. My rights are the same as devs over the source. I even get to tweak a liiiittle bit of C# here and there if I need to.

When we worked on the little Amazon.com search client mentioned in the video, we also used Source Control.

Sparkle's projects are MSBUILD (VS) projects, the very same you would create in VS (full or express). No worries about dev/designer team workflow...

I do think there is a deep meaning to all of this. This new platform (and tool) gave me the opportunity to pick developers' brains on a regular basis, something very enriching which I had not experienced before.

I am looking forward to see future product teams brainstorming control templates, reusable resources and layout mechanisms involving both designers and developers.

Let me know if you have any questions.

-mano

I'd like to hear more about how the actual tool was built, it looks really cool. (In other words, maybe the Sparkle dev team should start a blog)

The CDCer wrote:

Robert, appealing to a random list of Windows fanboys doesn't even begin to address my issues. I actually agreed with you that Office 12 is pretty cool, although it is really not much more than streamlining an overly complicated UI. What I am not shocked or awed is Windows Vista, which mostly a rehash of Mac OS X Tiger and some ancient Apple technologies. Are you going to admit the inexcusable WMP 10 bugs?

So, Quartz2D Extreme is usable in OS X?  No, didn't think so.  You're gonna have to wait 'til Leopard (around the Vista timeframe...) for that one.  If they can get it working reliably by then.

Since overlays will be all but forbidden in Vista the things which you denounce as "bugs" (but which aren't, and which go away if you tell WMP not to use overlays) will of course go away, but the corresponding performance of overlays will also go away.  It probably won't matter, because video cards and processors and buses are now "fast", and the price is probably worth paying (overlays are at best crap and exhibit all the problems you mention, and the OS being in control of the video card instead of applications being in control allows the OS to do more interesting things), but it's not without some cost.

"Sparkle" for the interactive designer?

Am I the only one thinking "Sparkle Motion"?

I Just watched the video -- very cool. Any idea when this product will be available for download like the Acrylic tool? Thanks

Sparkle, you are exciting and intuitive. See you around in a few years.

Ever since I first started playing with Avalon code, I've been doubting it's use due to the abstract nature of typing tags to build UIs. After seeing this, I know Microsoft has got it right.

I'm incredibly excited about this software, and can't wait to get my hands on it (CTPs anyone?)

I do, however, hope that VS.net 2005's Team Suite gets integrated. They've got an entire year (if they're targetting the Vista timeframe) to get it working

GREAT job everyone!

Another "programming tool" I can get excited about.
I'm a graphics guy, not a code guy.

I thought it was funny when Manuel talked about the "zee" axis. He's been americanized

z33driver wrote:

The CDCer said:

Robert, appealing to a random list of Windows fanboys doesn't even begin to address my issues. I actually agreed with you that Office 12 is pretty cool, although it is really not much more than streamlining an overly complicated UI. What I am not shocked or awed is Windows Vista, which mostly a rehash of Mac OS X Tiger and some ancient Apple technologies. Are you going to admit the inexcusable WMP 10 bugs?

How can you call it a rehash of OSX Tiger?  OSX does not do hardware accelerated 3d compositing of the desktop.  Apart from the superficial "sizzle" stuff in the UI, there's a ton of under-the-surface stuff that Apple doesn't have.

Even if they did have some of this stuff, from a developer tools perspective you can't really make a comparison.   There is no equivalent to VS.NET, XAML, WPF, WCF, etc. etc. on the Apple platform.

Besides, its a free market and a free country.  If you don't like WMP10 or Vista etc. don't use it!  Go use your Mac and write your apps in AppleScript and be happy.  Life's too short...

Every window in OS X is actually 3D surface rendered by GPU on machines supporting Quartz Extreme, and it's been like that since 2 years ago. Cocoa / Xcode / Interface Builder is way ahead of XAML / WPE / VS.NET.

Hi, I'm a Mac person, and part time OSX developer and I was totally blown out of the water watching this Sparkle presentation. There really has never been a tool like this on any platform ever. Of course, being a Mac person, I suppose I should show some skepticism at this point and make some unknowledgeable comments about how Microsoft will mess it up or something, but I don't really have any, apart from the fact that This tool is going to kill a lot of Adobe and Macromedia's business in years to come, especially when Acrylic is brought up to speed to compete against Illustrator and Microsoft brings out a Bitmap/Image editor to compete with Photoshop. Flash and Director are going to have a hard time competing with projects made with Sparkle, their only saving grace being that they are cross platform and Sparkle is Windows only, but Sparkle offer deep and incredibly easy integration with the OS and data sources which they cannot easily match. I expect that a lot of smallish apps will appear in the next few years made with Sparkle and that many of them will be utter junk in the beginning as developers with no eye for design or usability throw in gross and unwieldy 3D elements all over the place simply because they can, very much like the beginning web years were famous for embedded MIDI songs and Marquee tags and terrible graphics. But with time Sparkle will find its uses in making subtle 2.5D interfaces where the added feature of depth helps usability. To be honest I think it was only a matter of time before Microsoft started taking on the graphics and design market and I think Microsoft has both the talent and the resources to make Adobe really have to fight hard to maintain their market share, especially since so much design these days is for the web and the Expression tool will make web design much easier than it has been. I think the only real conspiracy I, as the token Mac devil here, can come up with is that the ability of XAML apps to be launched directly from the browser reminds me of one of Robert Cringley's more absurd theories that Microsoft will use XAML to try and kill html by subversion. Obviously, however, that isn't going to happen. Websites will be around for a long time to come and not everyone is going to go to the trouble of making XAML apps (even if they are a factor of magnitude easier to make with Sparkle than with html) if they also make a web application. It's very much like Flash in that regard in that Flash never became a major player in web apps, despite having all the possibilities of data bindings etc, because most large sites have to consider the html audience as well and wouldn't have the time or budget to make both html and Flash and went for the lowest common denominator. What I do think XAML apps, made with Sparkle or with VS will do, is do what Sun with Java WebStart never did, get easily downloadable web apps done right. I congratulate Microsoft on an excellent product with Windows Vista and tools like Sparkle based on Avalon, and hope that this spurs Apple to get off their behinds and to introduce similar technologies for Mac OSX. I believe that Mac OSX contributed to Microsoft innovating with Vista, in that Microsoft almost redid the entire Vista Experience to compete with OSX and I hope that Apple will do the same because of Avalon. After all, competition is good for all of us. P.S. Sorry about the formatting. It seems like Mac line breaks are not recognised and I wouldn't know how to do a CRLF manually.

Im really looking forward to this apps release, i can see so many differnet uses for it......imagine how much more powerfull this will be at the time of the final release.......after a one hour video im allready sold on it. avalon and its vector based design is honestly one of the most promising things ive seen. i really cant wait to get this and design a really awsome web page, Nice one microsoft

Question about Sparkle:

Can I use it to develop controls rather than applications? Let's say I want to create a video carousel control that I will reuse in many Avalon applications. Can I design the UI in Sparkle, hook it up with a little C# code (like the North Face demo), compile it to a DLL, and then import it into another Sparkle application?

jmacdonagh wrote:

Question about Sparkle:

Can I use it to develop controls rather than applications? Let's say I want to create a video carousel control that I will reuse in many Avalon applications. Can I design the UI in Sparkle, hook it up with a little C# code (like the North Face demo), compile it to a DLL, and then import it into another Sparkle application?

Hi,

Yes when you start a new project in Sparkle, you can choose to create a "Resource Dictionary" - this is essentially what you describe.

The resulting resource dictionary can be used as an external resource in any other application you build using Avalon.

Thank you all for the kind words. Keep the questions coming

Take care

-mano

Will tools like this be available someday for Visual Studio? (I'm not asking for a full-blown Sparkle-like program, but a graphical way to create XAML interfaces.)

How will coding XAML by hand look like in Visual Studio anyway?

BTW, this article is now on /. so that should increase visitors just a little.

I watched the video last night, and found it quite interesting.  I've always wanted a way to create XAML without hand-creating the tags/properties and (b) a tool that creates 3D apps easily.

It looks like this can accomplish both!  I'd definitely like to get my hands on this because honestly, I've done the whole installation process to get Avalon to run on my XP system and then got sick of it because it seemed too time consuming...

I'd definitely like to meet the graphical designer (Manuel) sometime and discuss some UI things with him.

This is making me want to move down to Redmond and work at Microsoft...

Even without the fact that this is a cool program the fact that it is a .Net program is cool.  Shows off quite well what .Net can do!

Hey everyone - great to see all the questions, you don't know how good it feels to be able to *finally* talk about something after 4 years

Avalonic:

I can't comment yet on the extension stuff yet sorry. There will probably be more details later.

Dr. Shim:

Yes the Visual Studio folks are doing some great work on their side, specifically for developers - as I said earlier, different users means different tools - the VS piece is code named Cider.

Take care

-mano

Man this stuff is amazing. Robert, you make a couple of references to an Acrylic video that was shot before this. I have been looking for it but to no avail. Is it coming up?

UlsterFry wrote:

To me it looks like MS's version of MM Flash, only it exports to XAML instead of swf.
Have to say, it looks very cool.

With all due respect, you may be victim of the “Flash-Killer” effect which unfortunately does not serve any purpose other than spreading marketing ideas by clever use of a mix of psychology, viral marketing and propaganda concepts. At the end, Flash authoring will be still the best choice for serious Flash food authoring unrelated to RIA, Photoshop will be still needed to get what it does done which is not application or web graphics, while it is Macromedia Flex Presentation Server and the Flex Builder, along with Dreamweaver before it (they are clones) that will stand in Microsoft path to the playground of Rich Internet Application authoring and development.

Now the ironic beauty of the scene is that Macromedia did not implement timeline in Flex Builder by fear to scare out developers with a non familiar approach to application development, while Sparkle (Microsoft equivalent to Flex Builder) does implement timeline and use just the right amount of it for features that Flex Builder can't support in its current form. Clever, very clever.

So, Manuel: please let me know if I'm wrong, but basically Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) is to compare to Macromedia Flex Presentation Server, Expression "Sparkle Interactive Designer" to Flex Builder, Expression "Acrylic Graphic Designer" to Fireworks, and Expression "Quartz Web Designer" to Dreamweaver. Am I right?

If I'm, well now we are talking... because what I see is Microsoft bringing .NET, Vista, the related technologies and tools right in the hand of Designers who were until then left behind with CSS and Kleenex as only tools for RIA authoring (considering that most of us can't or simply do not want to spend $12,000 dollars per CPU for Flex Presentation Layer, plus a licensing that simply refrain from providing hosting services based on Flex, and other option just far too green).

This is where it gets interesting and creates real opportunities for Designers like myself (probably millions) who simply do not know how to develop by writing code, but can leverage the concept of Service Oriented Architecture and Multi-tier Environment to actually "build" application and not just design them. It gets particularly interesting in a non-team development environment, where independent developer can do develop full presentation layers over third parties business logic and data layers.

Manuel: here you come right out of the screen (channel9 video)... I finally find a serious player in RIA development word with the better of the two worlds... I do not want to mobilize more blog space than I should for matter that may be irrelevant to actual programming developer, but I would get so much chatting with you about my current project and maybe get some advices and best ways to professionally migrate from web design to rich client authoring and development. Let me know, could be right here on the blog or by any other mean.

(by the way I felt some French vibes and influences by visiting your sites, and your name... are you from or related to France?).

Peace.
Stephane B.

I'm new to Channel 9, and after watching this video, its very impressive, but I don't see how practical it is to make all these controls/views out of random 3D objects. It's flashy, sure, but in 3 years time you'll have a thousand applications which all have their own weird UI styles. As far as the creating usable UIs without a line of code, I fail to see how this is any different from Apple's Interface Builder (neglecting the 3D whiz-bang eye candy in Sparkle). Explanations? IB is really simple: When designing, you drag controls from pallets onto your window, menus, etc. You connect (click-drag, very intuitive) controls to actions, and object members to controls (not all are necessary, depends if you need input, output or both for a control). Command-R (Alt-R on a PC keyboard) and you run the UI, all elements are clickable, and even work if you connect them to stock actions. There is a lot more to it, but its such a powerful tool for Mac programmers. Is Sparkle supposed to be IB work-alike + Flash-like abilities?

zephc wrote:

I'm new to Channel 9, and after watching this video, its very impressive, but I don't see how practical it is to make all these controls/views out of random 3D objects. It's flashy, sure, but in 3 years time you'll have a thousand applications which all have their own weird UI styles.

If you watch in the video (can't remember what time), there's a toolbar that has all the familiar Windows Forms controls -- Toolbar, ListBox, Label etc..

If you've ever looked at Avalon, it's actually not as hectic as they make it look. The UIs they show off are mostly just for show -- yes, it'll be fancier than your average Win API or WinForms app, but at the same time they're also preserving the Windows look-and-feel. I don't think it really changes how easy or how hard it is to make awkward UIs. Also, keep in mind that a lot of Sparkle was done in Sparkle, so that's a glimpse of what real Avalon apps will look like.

The whole thing with drag & dropping tools from a toolbox onto the window in a designer and then having it generate code has been around since MFC too, although it was really shabby. WinForms has it too and is damn clean (it shows you the form the exact way it would look and behave if it were compiled), but the document-view separation architecture is still a step short. I don't know about IB but I take it that's what it's like too, right?

That's where Avalon comes in, really. The fact that the big huge mass of web designers can start teaming up with programmers to work on client apps rather than web apps. The fact that you can actually have an artist do your design work. No more of those crazy 4 AM programmer-made GUIs, and no more "OMG what'd you do to the code Picaso?!" or "OMG that's fugly Bill!".

So yeah, I guess to me it looks like IB (Windows Forms) + Flash designer + unprecedented implementation of the document-view architecture.

zephc: it looks like reinux covered your question quite well already.

Stephane/icustuds: Great post. Feel free to post questions on my blog on MSN Spaces if you see a relevant thread there. I am glad you could relate to the philosophy of this platform for your work on Smart Clients / Applications. It is fair to compare with what is on the market out there today although Avalon was planned for a long long time and apart from Sparkle, things were public for at least 2 years (you could use XAML/Avalon betas, etc).

Here's a pretty simple overview of Interface Builder, but u get the idea: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/IBTips/Articles/MakingConnections.html

Great work guys. Can't wait to test the bits.

mclement wrote:

Stephane/icustuds: Great post. Feel free to post questions on my blog on MSN Spaces if you see a relevant thread there. I am glad you could relate to the philosophy of this platform for your work on Smart Clients / Applications. It is fair to compare with what is on the market out there today although Avalon was planned for a long long time and apart from Sparkle, things were public for at least 2 years (you could use XAML/Avalon betas, etc).

Actually I was not making any reference to value or anteriority in my comparison, forgive me if it looked like I did. I just discovered the concept of RIA through Macromedia's beta related to Flex during past year and a half, but discovered Avalon only 2 or 3 months ago (even if it apparently was around for much longer) but did not give lot of attention since I’m looking for a designer approach of RIA (GUI) which was provided by Flex Builder. The announcement of Sparkle changed the game and gathered my attention to Avalon for a better look. My comparison was just a way to make sure I’m making the right relation between the tools I’m using from Macromedia, and the tools I could be using instead from Microsoft (some of Sparkle features such the timeline and the ultra simplified way to manipulate 3D would make me do the switch).

I will post more tech specific questions to your MSN Space.

Few bits from the slides...

http://216.55.183.63/pdc2005/slides/TLNL03_Gossman.ppt
http://216.55.183.63/pdc2005/slides/TLNL10_Clement.ppt


100% Managed Code
1266 .cs files, 211,000 lines of code
141 .xaml files, 23,122 lines of code
1 PInvoke (call to htmlhelp)
6 main assemblies  4MB
Total build time:  1.5 minutes (2Ghz PentiumM)
No Win32 interop
Compiles on 64-bit without changes


The screenshots say "September CTP", one question remains - where?

androidi wrote:

The screenshots say "September CTP", one question remains - where?

We don't have any info regarding a downloadable build / CTP at the moment. Stay tuned!

mclement wrote:

androidi wrote: The screenshots say "September CTP", one question remains - where?

We don't have any info regarding a downloadable build / CTP at the moment. Stay tuned!

Are you saying there might be one in the future?!

And damn... not a single API call...  1.5 minutes to compile!

Good news:

We are working on putting together a CTP (preview build to download) of Expression Interactive Designer, stay tuned for dates

Sparkle has been described as a Flash killer. But what is to stop Macromedia from 3D enabling Flash?

Also, when will Sparkle be released? Vista won't be released until early 2007? So add on a year for enough people to actually have Vista then aren't we looking at nearly 2 1/2 years before making an app with Vista is worth while?

Whatever, I'm looking forward to it.

Sparkle appears to show alot of promise. There is clearly advantage in such a tool with such intergration with Avalon. I can only asume it will be a tool also used by web developers who will deploy full sparkle web productions from servers. I am interested as to whether IE7 has native support for sparkle or whether a plugin will be required as required for their competer Macromedia/Adobe Flash8.

I would make the asumption as IE is also an MS production their would be native support. Although that begs the question if MS will release plug-ins for competing browsers!!

From what i gathered from the video shown, full applications could be ran off an internet server and asuming permisions and trust were allocated you could run this app much like any other windows exe. However i asume this is limited to Vista users because its vector based, although if its run thourhg a browser i guess it can run on any platform browser thats sparkle enabled

I like the inclusion of 3D modeling and the simple way of converting 2D to 3D.

I understand that all the features of sparkle werent demonstrated in this video, but i wonder if a Flash style filter system is available for the blending, drop shadow, glow etc effects. Like those featured in expression - graphics designer.

I also noticed in the video when changing the depth of certain elelments they organised them, by selecting and sending to the back.... is there an alternative method of displaying the depth or layering of elements in sparkle?

Over all i believe at some point this is a tool that i will have to have on my desktop, however as a current Flash user it may take more to move me away from the comfort zone. Unless im aiming for solid vista intergration or some form of 3D design. Although this is coming from a designers perspective, i believe coders may prefer this platform for the simple swap from code to WYSIWYG, as well as its C# roots.

Although if Flash ever intergrates 3D..... and if AS2.0 is even more C# friendly.... although i know its already java friendly, ive not actually atempted to use C# with AS2.0

oh and i really loved thedata binding concept. Esppecially being able to bring in the xml doc and see the nodes in a menu, something i could do with when developing in Flash

p.s the scaling of the UI is an awsome feature......

OMG - the open sourcers are going to have fun trying to clone this

Did I hear a claim somewhere that Sparkle is the biggest or one of the biggest .NET projects? 211 kloc doesn't sound *that* big.

btw. Although the size of the download meant it took quite a while it was worth it in this case. It's nice when people are demoing software to actually be able to see the screen clearly.

rhm wrote:

Did I hear a claim somewhere that Sparkle is the biggest or one of the biggest .NET projects? 211 kloc doesn't sound *that* big.

Gotta love C#

rhm wrote:

OMG - the open sourcers are going to have fun trying to clone this

Actually I think most of it should run on Mono if they implement WinFX since there's no crucial P/Invokes... well they'll change that in the future I'm sure.

They might have trouble keeping the pirates at bay though. .NET assemblies are much easier to tinker with than native binaries. There' obfuscation, but I'm pretty sure it's limited in effectiveness.

Congratulations to the Sparkle team - even with all the buffering waits, it was an insightful hour of video. I'm a Flash developer, and much of what you've addressed in this product are things that as a developer I have had to create on my own. Data binding is a big one, my sites are driven by xml files that do everything from define the interface to diplaying media. But it has been a big task to make the system. I particularly like the "look under the hood" feature when it comes to graphics. After two years of drawing with the Flash API I can draw a complex gradient with code, but how nice to be able to draw in in WYSIWYG then look at the code in real time - that it something I've always wanted to develp in Flash, but the performance could never match what you're doing. The timeline currentState feature is something Flash's animation classes have overcome, but Sparkles timeline based view is definitely supperior, and would save me a lot of test publishing to get a look at what I've coded. Very nice. Back when Harvard Graphics and Word Perfect were the primary tools you were able to do the same thing with WordPerfect, you could flip to the code and set a variety of attributes and tags to alter the layout, it was very handy - and allowed us to take our litho department from golden rod to digital in 1988. This product should do the same for all application and web development. Flash killer? Well, it's a different beast, and you have a lot of ground to make up in the web market - but it looks very promising. As a Flash developer, I would certainly be willing to make the switch and at the very least learn another tool to push the boundries. Now, just so MS doesn't apply muscle to make sure "theirs" is the product. Leave it up to the developers, make it cross platform (don't omit a Safari Plugin), and please don't make us developers and clients choose one or the other just so you can leverage the market. Nice job, can't wait to give it a go.

Setember CTP release??? I am on the edge of my seat for a CTP... PLEASE SOON! :O

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the comments! I will try to help out where I see more details should be posted.

sinclairc5 wrote:

...
From what i gathered from the video shown, full applications could be ran off an internet server and asuming permisions and trust were allocated you could run this app much like any other windows exe. However i asume this is limited to Vista users because its vector based, although if its run thourhg a browser i guess it can run on any platform browser thats sparkle enabled

Any platform where WinFX is installed can run these "full" apps (XP SP2, Server 2003, Vista).

If you target the WPF/E ("Everywhere") runtime, they will run... everywhere. This is a subset of Avalon, but still very cool.

sinclairc5 wrote:

...
filter system is available for the blending, drop shadow, glow etc effects. Like those featured in expression - graphics designer.

I can't comment on effects yet.

sinclairc5 wrote:

...
p.s the scaling of the UI is an awsome feature......

Glad you like it

Hi,

I been reading about WPF (Avalon) and keep on hearing the next best thing to build UI and it’s improvement for better UX.  Few years back I was exposed to technology called Viewpoint (http://www.viewpoint.com).  It looked and still seems like a amazing technology, but it never took off, I never seen any website using this technology.  I thought it was lot better than a flash technology.  However as a .NET developer what will be the advantages choosing Avalon over Flex with Flash 8.5.  How is Avalon going to be better technology and what’s a difference Avalon technology going to bring other than what Viewpoint already does? Hoping to hear everyone’s view on Viewpoint technology

Thanks
Visionary

A couple of points.... I think of when I hear of Sparkle / Avalon being a "Flash-Killer."  In reality they are apples and oranges... Avalon / Sparkle is like Flex but it's much more than just Flex.

1 - Sparkle is an application to build user interfaces.  Like Flash these interfaces can live in a browser.  Unlike Flash you can run it on the desktop (smart clients, rich clients--this is important and Manuel talks about this idea of building "real applications").

2 - Macromedia's "Presentation Server" is great if my applications all run from a server.  If I have an application that needs to run somewhat disconnected or completely disconnected I am screwed.

3 - Avalon / XAML is a single platform to develop applications running on desktops, web apps, compact devices.

Microsoft has gotten something REALLY right here and it appears they are actually first with this.  I can't believe Macromedia isn't doing this exact thing but pairing up with Sun and Java to make cool interfaces available to web, desktop and compact device developers.  Swing is lame, Windows Forms is lame...

This is the future.

I think the most subtle but probably the most important aspect of Avalon is that it's the first true clean implementation of the document-view architecture. Most developers won't catch the importance of that aspect of WPF, but the ones who do will be making amazing software.

Oh yeah, if Manuel or anyone else is still watching, is there going to be a Forms Designer style editor integrated in Visual Studio, or is Sparkle going to be <i>the</i> editor?

It'd be nice if there'd be different editions of Sparkle the way there is the normal Visual Studio and another for web devs... I think a cheaper and more specialized version of Sparkle for client app developers would be good, since most of us will be more interested in maintaining consitent look-and-feel more than original design.

Ahh nice!

Thanks!

reinux wrote:

I think the most subtle but probably the most important aspect of Avalon is that it's the first true clean implementation of the document-view architecture. Most developers won't catch the importance of that aspect of WPF, but the ones who do will be making amazing software.

Absolutely... John Gossman is posting about this a lot in his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/johngossman.

reinux wrote:

Oh yeah, if Manuel or anyone else is still watching, is there going to be a Forms Designer style editor integrated in Visual Studio, or is Sparkle going to be <i>the</i> editor?

It'd be nice if there'd be different editions of Sparkle the way there is the normal Visual Studio and another for web devs... I think a cheaper and more specialized version of Sparkle for client app developers would be good, since most of us will be more interested in maintaining consitent look-and-feel more than original design.

There will be one  and it was shown at PDC along with Sparkle etc - Basically Visual Studio will have a design surface for Avalon. This surface (and the palettes that go with it) will be specifically focused on the things Developers do when they work with UI.

Manuel

You're welcome - this dev-oriented editor (Cider) was shown at the PDC keynotes along with Sparkle, Acrylic (graphics) and Quartz (web standards). You can watch it:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/manodesign/Blog/cns!1pRsSVBaAuwgFSti-clSJ6Ng!239.entry

Jump to 24:30 to see the developer <> designer workflow and the tools, which continues until 50:15.

Jump to 37:15 to see the specific Cider (for developers) <> Sparkle (for designers) workflow.

Manuel

It's great when you guys make the exact tools that we want and need. Thanks so much.

I have a designer friend that I work with on-and-off for websites. I do the programming; he does the designing. When I'm doing client-side software though, I'm on my own. So it really limits the sort of things that both of us can make.

I swear, the work you guys are doing isn't just cool, it's going to save people's careers. It's a shame that most devs nowadays don't see things that way, but you really should be proud.

By the way, when can we start playing with Cider?

hi

I develop Flash games. So i'm interested in this aspect of sparkle development. The games in the video, where they created within VS with C++ or inside sparkle with xaml? and is there anything else you can tell me about the game development aspects of sparkle?

regards

boombanguk

 

 

No C++, just C# or VB.Net code needed. Now I guess huge amounts of the game could be build right inside sparcle, with just a C# backend. Oh, and fyi: C# is much much easier to code than C++. So don't worry.

So when will the BETA or CTP of Sparkle be avaliable, because that is awesome!

Cider (Visual Studio Designer for WPF) videos

MSDN TV: Introducing "Cider" - The Visual Studio Designer for WPF ("Avalon")
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=950d1eec-5d4f-4a15-8250-d26e24b80a5d

   Introduction video
     http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/1/1/b1117d15-28cd-44bc-9a95-dfcb76623028/20051020CiderMB.EXE

   Demo video
     http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/1/1/b1117d15-28cd-44bc-9a95-dfcb76623028/20051020CiderMBDemo.EXE

 

 Channel 9 MSDN Videos - October 18, 2005
   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=87a5334b-e64a-46ae-a95f-cc64faf1147c

    cider_2005.wmv :
      http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/2/7/f2722c3f-963d-401a-a6f7-c026d7f1b08c/cider_2005.wmv

 

 Which Designer do I use?
   http://www.urbanpotato.net/default.aspx/document/2202

 

The "Cider" Avalon editor is available for download now, along with the December CTP of WinFX: http://spaces.msn.com/members/manodesign/Blog/cns!1pRsSVBaAuwgFSti-clSJ6Ng!350.entry

No Sparkle / Expression Interactive Designer tool yet though - stay tuned!

-mano

Manuel,

Any idea when a Sparkle Beta (or Alpha) will be available?  I got to play with Sparkle at the Hands on Lab at the PDC (In fact I think I gave you a hard time about the colors being washed out in the UI, which was the fault of the hardware.).  I have to say that I'm leaning towards doing most of the XAML heavy lifting in Sparkle and then the wiring in Cider.  But I'm not real sure I'd have to get my hands dirty with Sparkle first! 

Did I mention that I'd volunteer?

Cheers,

Sean

Hey Sean,

Unfortunately there is no date yet... Stay tuned! Thanks.
I basically say the same thing in all the posts I make on Ch9

-mano

IT IS OUT!

http://spaces.msn.com/members/manodesign/Blog/cns!1pRsSVBaAuwgFSti-clSJ6Ng!384.entry

Dear Sparkle team
I should confess that I'm wowed with the revolution you done, but I have a little question about the animation, well I noticed that I should create a new time line to each new event/trigger (and it's a big problem), I can attached many triggers to the same time line but all doing the same animation, is there any solution to this problem.

Hi! Thanks for the kind words

I am not sure to understand what you are trying to do. Could you describe this again in more details? You can create multiple timelines with the same event, so that they get triggered at the same time. I am not sure if this is what you were asking.

Take care!

-mano

Dear Mano
thanks for your reply , I'm so sorry but your answer didn't cover my qustion, so I need to describe the problem in more details, well I'll give you an example, I made a demo using Sparkle the demo is a simple form contains four buttons clicking one of it opens another form containing a grid so I tried to animate the buttons the problem is that I'm creating a new time line with a new animation to each button event,I have 4 buttons each have 3 events/states (normal-clicked-over) so I have 12 time lines each of it is totally isolated, each time I repet the animation (it's such a poor thing ), I can't control other time lines, I need to fully control the time lines, if there's something like action script in flash, I know Sparkle is still a trial version but I need you to consider that thing in the comeing versions, cause I liked Sparkle and I need it to be a powerful tool.

Kind Regards

:: TOLDO ::

Hi,

Thanks for the details, I can help you: you should create these animations inside the "Template" of your Button.

Press F1 and read about Control Styling and Control Templates - basically you can reuse the same Template and Style on as many buttons as you want.

This way if you have animations for MouseEnter, MouseLeave, Click - you only define 3 timelines inside your button Template and that's it.

This also works with any other controls/widgets beside Button of course.

-mano

Himanshu: thanks for posting this question on my blog, I just replied to you there:
http://spaces.msn.com/manodesign/blog/cns!DC8DC039B51DE219!239.entry

BTW I am now on the MSX Design team (AERO, etc):
http://spaces.msn.com/manodesign/blog/cns!DC8DC039B51DE219!460.entry

-mano

When is the scheduled RTM or launch date for Expression?