Nathan Dunlap talks about WPF from a designer's perspective

The Discussion

• 

  Right, this designers and developers thing working together sounds like a great thing although I'll reserve my final verdict for a couple of years to see how it really works out.
  
  As a stubborn developer I am playing around with both Interactive Designer (ID) and Visual Studio (See my blog). Being realistic I know sometimes you are just going to copy and paste XAML code between what your designer hacked up and what your developer hacked up (Naughty naughty, but living in the real world here).
  
  This copying and pasting between ID and VS does actually work quite well until you start using animations. The moment I create a simple animation using a timeline, e.g. a square moving from the left to the right of the screen) a couple of namespaces are added to the root element in ID.
  
  I 'sync' the namespaces in my root element with the one that is created by ID, e.g.
  
  <Page
   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
          xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
          xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
          xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/interactivedesigner/2006"
          mc:Ignorable="d"
          x:Name="RootPage"
          x:Class="UntitledProject1.Page1"
          WindowTitle="Root Page">
  
  However, when I then attempt to compile the project in VS it is complaining about the 'd' and 'mc' namespace whenever they are referenced such as:
  
  <Storyboard x:Key="Timeline1" d:StoryboardName="Timeline1">
                    <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00"
  Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Child
  ren)[1].(ScaleTransform.ScaleX)" Storyboard.TargetName="GolfVideo">
                          <SplineDoubleKeyFrame
  d:KeyEase="Linear;Linear;0.5;0.5;0.5;0.5" KeySpline="0.5,0.5,0.5,0.5"
  Value="0.0043859649122802912" KeyTime="00:00:00"/>
  
  This is probably something easy and silly, but I cannot get it to work. I could change my workflow to the way Nathan works, but I need to truly understand what is going on under the covers.
  
  Any advice would be appreciated.
  

• 

  Is it really this guy http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=170670 that did this interview? How come?
  its very cool.

• 

  He'd really look like Tony Blair with more hair
  

• 

  Wow -- good voice recognition.  It was me!  I've been working with Nathan for years, so it was only natural that I give him some props on nine... 

• 

  Jeroen -- Rather than cut/paste, my recommendation would be to have the same .csproj file open in both tools -- this is what Nathan does in his screen cast.  That way both should stay in synch with any changes to the metadata in the .proj file as you add/remove/change stuff.  In other words, avoid cut and paste if possible and add things by adding .dlls, again as shown in the screencast.

• 

  Cheers Karsten, I also got your reply via Andrew. I know sooner or later it (copying XAML) is going to come up and I just HAVE to know. [6]
  
  I will do a diff on the projects that are generated and compare the VS one with the ID one.

  Thanks for your help.