Hi,

First of all I recommend the tutorials that come with our SDK. Many of those tutorials describe Xaml that can be edited by hand (with simple tools like http://kaxaml.com/) and they are a good start to learn the possibilities of xaml. Continue reading more information about basic concepts in the MSDN is recommended too. With this and a tool to import SVG (like http://inkscape.org that supports) you can start doing great designs.

For more complex designs (although my recommendation is that you should always have a look at the raw Xaml) you have Expression Blend 4. But it seems that it is not available for download out of MSDN subscriptions because they are pushing VisualStudio2012 Update2 that comes with Blend integrated. But you need Windows7. Previous versions of Visual Studio (since 2008) come with an editor too, although not as powerful as Blend.

It seems that Microsoft Expression Studio 4 is still available for download

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... px?id=5915

Hi
I went thru the docs. Now the iOS sample has a "data" folder and a whole bunch of files with file names that look like GUIDs. How do you create them using Blend 4 ?

Also I tried making something simple in Blend and could preview it in the browser with Silverlight installed. Now I tried to load it in the XAMLPlayer by copying the XAML into its dir but I kept getting errors. What is the process in editing something Blend 4, saving in the forlder where you have other examples, open XAMLPlayer doubleclick on the XAML file ?

Thanks
Sanjit

Hi,

The better way is that you create the project directly inside the Data folder. That way you can edit it in Blend and have XamlPlayer refreshing the content each time you want to visualize it (with F5). First time you create the data you have to click on Scan in XamlPlayer to detect it. The provided example Gui/TicTacToe (in the SDK) follows that pattern. It is a blend project.

GUIDs files inside /Bin/Data are create by BuildTool. There is a root file named guids.txt with all the resources in case you want to filter when deploying (this is something we will provide in buidtool in the future). Note that, XamlPlayer uses internally buildtool, so it generates the GUIDs files automatically.

The information I gave you was not correct because XamlPlayer only generates GUIDs for the active platform. So you need to generate the cache directory for iOS using the BuildTool:

Just can't get a ui done in Blend 4 to work in xamlplayer. We created the project in the data folder. It needs a folder called Contents to work... Tried WPF app and Silverlight app. Xamlplayer catches it on refreshing but I always get an error saying some element like main window etc is not found. A proper workflow tutorial and mobile demo will help immensely. We don't use Unity but have a custom OpenglES engine.

When you create a WPF application within Blend, it automatically creates classes for code-behind for the App.xaml and the MainWindow.xaml.
You have to delete these .cs files and remove the x:Class that refers to these classes.
Then you should be able to open XamlPlayer and load that MainWindow.xaml.

Also notice that if you want to integrate that xaml in your application, you should not use a Window as root of the xaml because it will try to create a new operating system window. You can use a Grid as root instead.

Hi,

Yes, we know the tutorials are quite limited and we are going to improve it, this way:

• The Blend tutorial that we had is intended for creating applications that are entirely managed by NoesisGui and that doesn't seem to be a common scenario. We are going to create a new Blend tutorial for people that wants to design xamls to integrate into their applications. The trick her, is avoiding the app.xaml and the mainwindow.xaml because they have code behind that you need to replicate with c++ classes. The easy way here is using always known containers (like stack panels) like the rest of the tutorials.
• We need to explain clearly howto build the data for each of the platforms using the build tool (the steps I described you in the past in this post)
• Instead of a single integration tutorial, we need to create a integration tutorial for each platform that will follows from the Blend tutorial I described above.

I think this way everything is going to be more clear, specially for people that is new to Xaml.
Meanwhile let us help you with your files. Don't hesitate to ask us anything, you can paste .xaml here and we can help you to make it work.

Thanks!

Ok thx !

Can we also create a ui programmatically ? This would be great as well.

Sanjit

Yes, everything you can do with .xaml is accesible to C++. For example, a simple grid with a centered button:
Inside the documentation, in the section Class Hierarchy, every class is documented. Of course this document will be improved with the time.