Mark Wilson-Thomas: WPF and Silverlight Development in Visual Studio 2010

The Discussion

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  Video quality in both silverlight and WMV High looks as if it's encoded improperly (or edited using lossly compressed material and recompressed), looks blurry and low res.

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  Thanks... I'll look into that.

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  Nice interview and a pragmatic explanation on the past, present and future of the designer.

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  Will VS 2010 include an interface for Visual State Manager ( VSM )? 
  
  Will VS 2010 include and work with new SketchFlow?
  
  Will VS 2010 include themes that work with DataGrid, DataPicker, Calendar?
  
  Can't wait to play with the bits?  Thanks

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  Looks really cool.

  
  

  In the demo you where dragging in controls that where being generated from the data source. Will that work for those of us using an MVVM style of architecture where the DataContext is set in the code behind, so the designer doesn't actually know the type of the data that we are binding to? 

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  Hi Shaggygi!

  In answer to your questions:

  1. We won't have specific UI to address the Visual State Manager in Visual Studio 2010, but we will support XAML that uses it. So you can design for VSM in Blend and then use the XAML in Visual Studio 2010. This is in common with control template editing.

  2, No, we won't include Sketchflow in Visual Studio 2010; it is part of the Microsoft Expression family of products and that team will determine how and when it will be made available publicly.

  3. The new WPF theme packs on Codeplex at http://wpf.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WPF%20Themes already address a wide variety of controls; I'll check in with my colleagues on that team to see what their plans are for dealing with DataGrid, DatePicker and Calendar and let you know.

  We're glad you're looking forward to the Beta - we're really looking forward to your feedback on it!

  Thanks

  Mark Wilson-Thomas

  Program Manager, WPF & Silverlight Designer Team, Visual Studio

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  In response to #3: The themes are "officially" supported only for the controls in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 I believe, and do not work for the DataGrid, Calendar, and DatePicker which were shipped out of band (though you should be able to extend them yourself to work with these controls).  We would like to eventually extend the themes to work with the new controls, but we haven't been resourced to do this yet and do not have a date for when this might be available in the future.  Thanks!