OrangeFlash

I was playing with Microsoft Blend (previously known as Interactive Designer) for a while, and now I think I’m ready to write short tutorial. Since I’m basicaly ActionScript coder this article will contain some migration tips and comparisons with Flex\ActionScript.

For this tutorial you will need:

• Microsoft Expression Blend Beta 1
• .Net 3.0 Framework
• Some C# IDE ( C# Express for example which I’m using in this tutorial)

In this tutorial we will learn how to work with mouse events in blend
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In List based controls from Flex Framework, we aren’t allowed to create itemRenderers with different size, due to the way Lists are scrolled (we scroll model instead of view). But sometimes we just have to do this, for example if we want to fill List with different images, or text with different formatting.

So I’ve decided to create List-Like component based on VBox, which has dataProvider and itemRenderer properties, and can render items with different sizes, which looks like this:

Download Examples
Example

WPF Dev Team offers free training for people who want to develop under Windows Communication, Presentation and Workflow foundations.

Requirements:

2 Years of expirience
Expirience with Web Applications and\or Windows Forms Applications and\or Server Components and\or XML Web Services.

Go get it!

In ActionScript 1-2, we often needed to create preloader for images, because we couldn’t show them while loading were in progress. ActionScript 3.0 changes this, with ByteArray and URLStream classes we can work with bytes instead of files.

That means that we can show half of the image, or different states of progressive JPEG file.
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I dont like the way we create and modify items with ContextMenu class in ActionScript 3.0, first we have to create item, then add event listener, then push our item to ContextMenu.customItems, I think this is quite alot of code for simple task. And there is one more disadvanage, we cannot subclass ContextMenu items, this means we cannot create subclass which would add some items by default.

All this inspired me to create my own class which would manage ContextMenu instance. Then I’ve added methods like remove, insert, getItem.
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Well, to be honest this is not competely truth, we cannot write in ActionSctipt for .NET 3.0, but we can write in JScript which is subtype of JavaScript 2.0, which is ECMA4… well this is just like ActionScript 3.0 ;). The only one seriouse difference is classes and their location, but we still have ByteArray, BitmapData\Bitmap and ColorMatrix (which is ColorMatrixFilter in AS) and bunch of other similar classes.

Now, .NET 3.0 is compatable with version 1 and 2, so that means that we can compile library for .NET 2 and use it in our WPF/E-.NET 3.0 project.

For this mini tutorial you’ll need .NET 3.0 and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer.
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Long long time ago, I’ve created simple application - EffectsPlaygroung. EP could help you preview effects from mx.effects.* package. Everything was fine, but code was awfull, and UI design was hard to understand (Guess where is the button?).

So I’ve decided to rewrite it, current version can:

Create new Effects (Effect Settings menu)
Add Effects to Composition(Composition Settings or Via Effect header context menu)
Preview Effect(Play menu)
See Code(See Code menu)

I also plan to implement some drag and drop functionality.

Check this out.

Well this is pre-alpha version of my first .NET 3.0 application, dont kick me please. Currently this is really-simple-OrangeFlash-rss reader, that means, that it can read only this feed, but dont worry this is temporary.

Download application
Download sources

You will need NET 3.0 runtime and Expression Interactive Designer.

Yesterday I wrote about Yahoo Flash Developer Center, and posted simple example example with web search using Yahoo API, now I present Yahoo Spell Checker, source files avaliable here

This works slowly, but I have an idea. This application should have some kind of local dictionary, which would filter words for checking, for example “I”, “the”, “hello”, “flash” and other commonly used words should not be checked, this should speed up the proccess.

Yahoo lunched Flash Developer Center.

With Search API we can:

• Use ussual web search
• Image search
• context search
• news search
• term extraction
• local search
• spelling suggestions
• and related suggestions

Here is very simple example of web search