ISV Strategy Day

During November 2007, and thanks to an invitation from Sandra Marin of Microsoft Andino, I had the opportunity to present, together with Juan Diego Velasco of Gattaca, the Bogotá and Medellín sessions on software development processes between the Designer and the Developer using Microsoft's Expression Suite.

In these sessions we showed a two-handed exercise in which we built from scratch an application that consumes a web service exposing the water consumption of the inhabitants of an imaginary city.

During the presentation, Juan Diego exported the company logo from Illustrator to Expression Design; then in Expression Design the graphical interface was built using the best usability and user experience criteria.

All of the above was exported to Expression Blend and some effects and properties of the tools were demonstrated; at this point we interacted with the developer and built the databinding of the controls. When Juan Diego finished the Design, we opened the project in Visual Studio 2005 (with the Framework 3.0 extensions) and linked a web service data source to the application.

After doing these exercises, using Expression Encoder we encoded a video and built the Silverlight player; we did a dissection of Silverlight and explained its features and how it works.

To finish, with Expression Web we created a project and used the Silverlight player and the Web integration features to demonstrate some Ajax and the joint work process between the Developer and the Designer in Web projects.

In the related files section we published the PowerPoint we used that day and the resulting project.

Related Files:

Presentation used

Source Code (40+ MB, Includes Video)

Required Resources:

Expression Design

Expression Blend

Expression Encoder

Expression Web

Visual Studio 2005 (with extensions for Framework 3.0)

Silverlight plug-in.

IIS (to run the Web services)

SQL Server 2005 (For the database used by the web services)

I hope this is helpful

Juan Peláez
MCTS
Member of the Microsoft Speaker Group
Member of the Andean Influencer Framework.

Keywords: Expression, Juan Peláez, Juan Diego Velasco, Software Development, Best Practices, Graphic Design, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Web, Silverlight, Gattaca S.A., Software Development, Colombia, Spain, Medellín, Bogotá, XML, WPF, Framework 3.0,

PS: In the coming weeks I will be in Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela presenting the Andean Road Show, an event for Microsoft platform developers. I hope to see you at the shows.