The AGT (Argentum Tela) series of articles is an effort to do two things. Usually an idea is presented only in its finished form. The first goal is to do some Reality Blogging, to show an idea evolve over time without pulling any punches. The second goal, and the example vehicle for the evolution aspect, is an extensible Design Surface for Silverlight similar to what we have in Visual Studio 2008. This type of application has all sorts of interesting uses. My example is a Home Theater layout tool. Read the entire saga: http://www.damonpayne.com/2008/09/14/RunTimeIsDesignTimeForAGT0.aspx

Visual Refactoring

Since this is a Silverlight application I thought I should spend some time making it look good. I hit my frustration limit in a very short period of time and what you see here is as far as I got. I am guessing Styling is not entirely baked in Silverlight 2 beta 2, or else doing a complete control template is really the way to go.

My first issue was with fonts. I downloaded a copy of the Trajan Regular font. Ever since Klipsch started using Trajan pro in the Palladium branding I’ve been digging the Trajan font family. At any rate, it seems that Silverlight is very picky about using extra fonts, be they set from a style or per control. Worse, it’s very difficult to track down where the issue might be. I have three primary tools available to me for Silverlight debugging: Blend 2.5 June CTP, VS2008 SP1, and running the application for inspection. Debugging is not fun when all three tools show different output, check out the ToolboxView:

Blend shows the correct font and color. VS2008 shows the correct nothing. Runtime shows the correct color but not font. I’ve tried obvious things like double checking relative paths and so forth. At this point I’m admitting defeat and moving on. At least my bad taste and visual look stolen from Klipschcorner’s CSS is better than black and grey. Right? Let’s skip to the punchline, here is what the application looks like now:

Couch++

I tricked a visual designer into making me a better purple couch. This person happens to be an extreme Adobe fanboy, to the degree that they didn’t believe me when I said there were other drawing programs for both vector and raster graphics. The Adobe fans are easily worse than the Mac fans. At any rate, that sure looks like a couch, at least. It’s rather large in relation to the design surface, but we’ll fix that with resizification later.

Speakers

I haven’t really thought of what all I want to include in the example HT Layout program, but I figured some speakers would be nice. I’m getting slightly better at drawing some things in Blend: these speakers look better than my original couch. If you’re not familiar with horn-loaded speakers you’ll have to trust me that the white horn shape is actually a reasonable caricature.

Conclusion

I’ll refactor later as I get to read more about the control templating and style creation. I think the app is starting to look like a real program, and we’re still less than 1000 lines of code. The next articles are not written yet, but the next step is to implement functionality that allows me to move, resize, and otherwise Transform things once they are on the designer surface. As it turns out, this is a very interesting problem for all sorts of reasons. I’m not breaking my Reality Blogging pledge, but remember I’ve done this in WinForms before, and I recall things like “selection” being more complex than it sounds: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.design.iselectionservice_members.aspx . Once selection is implemented moving and resizing come free in WinForms, and I’ve got to build those from scratch now. I’m sure I’ll be spending some time in traffic this week and I’ll spend many mental cycles thinking about the interactions.

Source Code:DamonPayne.AGT[9].zip (1.26 MB)