• Download Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Download the Windows Live Photo Gallery SDK
• Check out the Windows Live Photo & Video Blog

Photo Gallery includes a publishing API that can be used to create custom plugins to publish your photos to any site. The app ships with a Flickr plugin and the SDK includes the source for the plugin. Without any modification, you can select a number of photos from your library then publish either to an existing Flickr Set or a new set. Along the way, you can set the permissions (public, friend, family, friend & family) for all of the photos you’re uploading.

So, this is where my modification comes in. There are times when I want to tag a few photos as public and the rest as private. With the default plugin, this would require two upload operations. With my updates, the plugin looks for specific tags on each photo that set flickr permissions:

switch (keyword.InnerText)
{
     case "flickr: public" :
          isPublic = true;
          break;

     case "flickr: family" :
          isFamily = true;
          break;

     case "flickr: friends" :
          isFriend = true;
          break;

     case "flickr: friends+family" :
          isFriend = isFamily = true;
          break;

     default :
          tags.Add(keyword.InnerText);
          break;
}    

I can now quickly add a tag using Photo Gallery and let the plugin handle the permissions for me automatically. This is by no means a perfect solution, but something that has saved me some time. I had to change the plugin in a few places throughout the project, but you can find the heart of the change in the SessionLoadItemInfo method of XmlHelper.cs. If you just want to take the plugin for a spin, run PluginSample.msi found in the bin\Debug folder of the zip.

Download Source: Windows Live Photo Gallery Flickr Uploader

The original version of the panel creates a Fireworks text block, pastes the generated XAML inside the text block, then does a clipCut() to remove the text block from the stage and copy it to the clipboard. The latest version (posted here), sends the XAML back to the Flash panel and, using the System.setClipboard() method, pastes the XAML to the clipboard. The result is a noticeably faster export operation, a very nice surprise.

I’ve also done a little additional housecleaning, adding support for the new pixel-based rounded corners feature of Fireworks CS4. This is actually one of my favorite new features — where previously the CornerRadius of rectangles in Fireworks was percentage-based (meaning the amount of roundness would change as you resized the rectangle) you can now specify a pixel-based CornerRadius. This approach ensures the same CornerRadius regardless of the size of the rectangle. (This is how both WPF and Silverlight do it also). The updated panel will honor both percentage and pixel-based roundness modes.

I also updated the way text is converted to paths. Now, instead of a group of individual path objects (the result you get when you select Text > Convert to Paths in Fireworks, I go two steps further, first ungrouping the indivual paths, then joining them into a single path. The result is a much cleaner single Path object.

One last fix I made over the weekend addresses a problem exposed by Silverlight. The FW to XAML panel automatically adds a .Resources collection to the outermost panel, should any of its children need to define a brush resource. Often, this Resources collection was rendered as an empty node <Grid.Resources />, something that the Silverlight engine does not like (WPF just ignores it). So, this latest update removes the Resources node if it’s empty. You’re welcome!

Summary of Changes

• New Clipboard Logic – supports Fireworks CS4, improved performance
• Support for both percentage and pixel-based rectangle roundness modes (pixel-based mode introduced with FW CS4)
• Text to Paths operation results in fewer XAML objects
• No longer render empty Resources collection (exposed via Silverlight)

Download DevScovery: Introduction to Blend Presentation

The Meeting in the Middle zip file includes the presentation, a demo project, and a Fireworks source file used for layout. This is the third time I’ve done this presentation and the second time I’ve done it with Josh. This time, we worked through the slides, covering core concepts in WPF that enable an effective designer/developer workflow and concluded the presentation by creating a simple XML-bound layout. Josh created the rough, developer-styled layout in Visual Studio, then I stepped in and imported artwork from Fireworks and tweaked the layout in Blend. We made it through without any problems – a miracle considering how many moving pieces there were. We kept the scope of the application extremely small though, so that worked in our favor.

Download DevScovery: Meeting in the Middle Presentation

In an effort to get more code to the public faster, Infragistics’ WPF team has shipped an interim build of NetAdvantage for WPF controls planned for the 2008 Volume 2 release. This release includes two major enhancements: xamOutlookBar and Printing Capabilities that not only easily print the xamDataGrid, but allow for the creation of a fully stylized report. The xamOutlookBar is styled and has functionally modeled off of Outlook 2007 which greatly increases the developers ability to create line of business applications. The Printing Capabilities allow not only printing, but allow for publishing documents out as XPS.

The CTP includes a Silverlight Chart and Silverlight Gauge both of which you can see in the online demo. So download the bits, take them for a test drive, then send us feedback and help shape the final shipping product!

For those of you who’ve been thinking about creating your own custom skin, now you finally have some incentive to do it! Josh and I put in a lot of late nights to release Podder v2 in time for Mix ’08. That was almost two months ago, so I’m sure you’ve already had ideas for new skins that you just haven’t made time for. Well, you have until July to realize your vision – so get to it and impress us all!

The second video demonstrates a feature that I’m really excited about: ResourceWashing. Using ResourceWashing, you can “wash” the brushes defined in ResourceDictionaries with a new color. Since the brushes can be washed at runtime, you can create an application that can be infinitely customized by the end user — really exciting! This is the same washing technology used by AppStylist for Windows Forms in the “New from Template” feature. The xamRibbon is the first control whose brushes have been grouped into “WashGroups” to really take advantage of this technology. Moving forward, we’ll be applying the same techniques to the other controls. I can’t wait to see what the WPF community ends up creating with this technology!

Videos

• xamRibbon QuickStart Video
• ResourceWashing Video

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably also reading Josh Smith‘s blog, and you’re probably aware that I’m working on a new skin for Podder, his WPF podcast reader. Throughout the design process, I’ve had lots of different ideas running through my head – I really have a clean slate to play with here, and any of you who have designed an app or web site from scratch know how challenging that initial blank page can be. There are so many possibilities, so many directions you can take the layout; ultimately, you just have to go with something then tweak until you go crazy. It’s definitely a different process than designing something that works (visually) with an existing product line. There, you have an established aesthetic that drives the design.

So, as I go into the polish stage and really have a feel for the direction the layout is going, I’m looking at ways to make the application feel responsive, alive. One way I’m doing this is through my “McGuffin”-Enabling Image Converter. This converter is bound to an Image’s Source property and then returns an “averaged” Color – I take a random sampling of pixels then average their color values. The resulting color represents the generalized color of the image. In Podder, I’m using this converter to set the background image of the application to a color that works well with the image of the selected podcast, so as the selection changes, the color of the application changes to match, and the plot advances (my McGuffin).

I’ve added this converter to the Infragistic ToyBox assembly that I started a while back (and haven’t actively added to in a while). Download the sample project to see the converter in action. (Note: it currently only works with local images, not images whose source points to a web address).

With the release of NetAdvantage for .NET 2008.1, we’ve also rolled out an update to the infragistics.com home page. Front and center on the home page you will see our updated product icons. These icons served as a starting point for artwork updates throughout the site and product, from updated box shots to control landing pages. We actually introduced site-wide artwork updates with the WPF 2007.2 release in January, I just didn’t get a chance to call out the changes. The icons were very much a team effort within the Visual Design Group, with everyone contributing in some way. I feel like we’ve done a good job of abstracting the target platforms into representative icons. We actually spent more time fine-tuning the final colors than we had to spend creating the illustrations. You hit the limit on the hue spectrum pretty quickly when you’re trying to create unique colors for a large number of products.

The updates on the sub-pages are subtle, a face-lift really. If you’re a frequent visitor to the site, you probably won’t be able to identify the changes, you’ll just feel the difference. The control pages, like the xamRibbon page, have all been updated with new background and menu treatments. We had received a few comments from site visitors saying they couldn’t find certain pages, even though they were available directly on the side nav. So, we updated the treatment of the menu items on the side nav, left aligning each item and adding separators. With the changes, the left nav should look more like a menu and not fade away into the periphery.

The updated icons and background treatments can also be seen throughout the product, from installation screens to about dialogs. I think it’s a nice, fresh start for the 2008 releases.

We have plenty of ideas for making the overall experience better, but I’d love to get some feedback anyway. I’m currently using a xamCarouselListBox at the top of the window to display resource dictionaries. In mockups this approaches looks clean and nice, but in practice it doesn’t really cut it. Most of our resource paths are actually longer than the template for each item provides, so we start to see text colliding. I’m planning on moving the resource list to the left side of the page and possibly presenting it in a tree or vertical tab format. I want to reinforce the relationship between the active resource page and the grid of resources. Later posts will also incorporate usage visualizations courtesy of our new xamChart.

 So — download Pistachio and take it for a spin! Let me know if you love it or hate it (or if it doesn’t work for you).