At PDC, a customer told me about a prototype he had built using several tab controls. He then asked me how one could include the content of different tabs of a tab control in the Microsoft Word documents that the SketchFlow Word Export creates – normally, only the tab set to visible at design time is shown.

It did not occur to me the moment that customer asked me, but there is actually a simple way to make multiple tabs of a screen appear in the Word output. The idea is very simple – just create a visual state for each tab you want to show, and edit the state so that the desired tab is shown. (more…)

I just updated the PDC demo project at http://electricbeach.org/files/SnowboardSketch_Demo_PDC.zip

The original post contained some references to the Expression Blend sample behaviors (which you can download at expressionblend.codeplex.com), but it seemed easier to make the project stand-alone by removing the references, as the samples were only used to show of the MouseGestureTrigger.

If you do want to play with that (which is great fun), just download the sample project on its own.

Regards,
    CS

UPDATE 11/18 - Re-posted the demo project, removing references to the expression behavior samples. This removes the MouseGestureTrigger demo, but should make the project work stand-alone. If you want to play with the mouse gesture trigger, download the samples from expressionblend.codeplex.com separately, please.

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Thanks to all of you that visited my talk at PDC09. I was really happy to see such a large audience and so much interest in prototyping with SketchFlow, and in the opportunities for developers to extend SketchFlow to make it possible for designers to create rich interactivity without code.

In this post: A link to the demo project, and many other links that help you getting started with writing your own behaviors.

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Microsoft’s professional developer conference (PDC) starts Monday in Los Angeles. We have a number of talks on Expression Blend and SketchFlow. If you are coming to PDC, we’d love to see you there…

I will hold a talk on SketchFlow on Tuesday at 4:30pm. In this talk, I’ll give a demo of SketchFlow and show how developers can extend and adapt SketchFlow by adding new behaviors to SketchFlow’s vocabulary of interactivity. Of course, I’d also love to hear your feedback and answer questions after the session, or at any other time during PDC.

If you are interested in Behaviors and effects, Pete Blois (who is also the author of Snoop and Rooler) will give an in-depth talk on Thursday at 12:45pm. I think this will be a must-see session for anybody interested in the Blend’s behavior model.

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Here’s a nice video from Steve White with some tips on styling buttons in Silverlight with Blend 3…

http://electricbeach.org/apps/Silverlight Button Control Styling Tips/Default.html

In a previous post last week I posted a sample for a behavior for conditional navigation by using a global state object. Just a few days later, we got a question on how to represent and reflect user roles (or other global state) in a SketchFlow application. This article shows a simple example how this can be done. There are many possible extensions and variations on this technique, but in this post I can’t do more than show a simple starting point.

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Yesterday, somebody asked me how to do conditional navigation in SketchFlow. Out of the box, there is no built-in behavior to do conditional navigation, but the good news is that it is not hard to write one. Here is an example for how to do it.

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Nick Josevski shows in an article on his blog how to create type-on animations using SketchFlow Animations.

He also asks if anybody knows a different, maybe easier solution.

Here is a really simple, quick&dirty behavior sample that handles type-on animation for text blocks.

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Here is a post that shows you how to embed SketchFlow prototypes in a DotNetNuke site

Interesting article on SketchFlow by Don Burnett:

http://uxmagic.com/blog/post/2009/07/12/Prototyping-a-WPF-3D-game-design-workflow-using-TrueSpace-3D-Expression-Blend-3-with-Sketchflow-and-exporting-the-prototype-XNA-Game-Studio.aspx