Don Xml's Grok This

Chip is wondering if the New Jersey developer community would be interested in a user group focused on building User Interfaces using the various Microsoft tools/technologies.  Chip has been looking to start up a user group, but like a lot of us, his interests vary widely, and he wants to make sure that there would be enough interest, and ...

Microsoft recently release the first public beta of their Expression Interactive Design tool (aka Sparkle), and I finally can get a chance to play with it and publicly talk about it.  The most important thing to remember with this tool is that it is not geared towards the developer.  The code name Cider product is the analogous tool on ...

One of my first blog posts (way back in April 2003 and on the old DotNet Weblogs site, now Weblogs @ ASP.Net) was called Pet Peeve – Using HTML Tables to Control Web Page Layout.  Since that early post I really haven’t seen much headway made in the .Net camp to oust the Table camp and replace them with the CSS Camp.  There ...

First off, I really, really wanted to love Microsoft’s latest graphics tool, codename Acrylic.  I down loaded and install the first public beta, and wasn’t impressed, but hey, it’s an early view into what they are doing, so I decided to cut them some slack (it is based on Creature House Expression, which MSFT bought in 2003).  I ...

Hmm, just heard about this news.   Does this show how scared Adobe (and maybe Macromedia) is of Avalon and XAML?  Over the last couple years there has been 2 major camps within Adobe, the PDF camp and the SVG camp, and both didn’t seem to like each other.  Some Macromedia employees have been known to slam SVG (although ...

I haven’t seen this posted anywhere else, and I found out about it via a email sent to one of my old accounts that I’ve never used for my other Adobe stuff, so I guess I can talk about it.  It looks like Adobe is looking for folks to beta test their XML/PDF Form Designer.  I don’t know anything else besides what is on ...

With all the XAML-GUI development going on I forgot to mention a cool tool that I use to convert rastered images to vector called VectorEye.  It can convert bmp, jpeg, png, and tiff files to SVG, PS or EPS.  Converting raster to vector is more of an art than a science, and it takes a bit of work playing with the options to get the vector output ...

Taking Pablo’s suggestion of using Illustrator to create XAML-GUI, I was able to get it to work with a few caveats.  Yes, Illustrator can create XAML-GUI thru Illustrator’s printing functions and the WCPD, but it is hard to control the generated output.  With Illustrator’s SVG export functions, you can control the number of decimal places of the ...

One of the things I want to do with blog is to help the SVG developer learn XAML, and get the XAML developer to understand SVG.  Hopefully by crossing training both groups we can help make both technologies much better.  I believe that both groups can learn from each other. My first major XAML project is something that I’m helping Chris Sells ...