Why... [modified]
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When the freakin' IDE breaks when you're trying to design a form, it sucks. Period.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
When the freakin' IDE breaks when you're trying to design a form, it sucks.
That's really a VS issue there. Have you tried using Expression Blend? It's a lot stabler than VS is for designing WPF UI. What a lot of folks do is to create UI in Blend, and then copy/paste the Xaml into VS.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com link -
...does WPF have to suck as bad as WWF? [EDIT] Ouch - those '1' votes really hurt. I think I'm going to cry... not. Almost an hour later, and WPF still sucks. All the '1' votes in the world won't change that.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001modified on Sunday, December 28, 2008 9:21 AM
Don't forget WCW.
My Blog: http://cynicalclots.blogspot.com
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WPF has a steep learning curve - several times steeper than WinForms. Give it time and you'll then be able to say with more authority whether it sucks or not :)
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkPerhaps it is because I'm from a web-development background, so markup is second nature to me, but I really don't think WPF has such a steep learning curve at all. Sure things are very different from Winforms, but it really isn't that difficult I think. But again, it may be because in some ways it resembles web-development.
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, `Who is destroying the world?' You are."
-Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand -
...does WPF have to suck as bad as WWF? [EDIT] Ouch - those '1' votes really hurt. I think I'm going to cry... not. Almost an hour later, and WPF still sucks. All the '1' votes in the world won't change that.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001modified on Sunday, December 28, 2008 9:21 AM
Your issue is probably more of a VS issue than anything to do with the WPF API. I actually think WPF is way nicer than Winforms, for many things (not all). But sure, it is not as mature as Winforms. Also the VS designer suuuuuuuuuucks big time. And yes, WWF is one ridiculously bad API - what a waste of developer time.
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, `Who is destroying the world?' You are."
-Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand -
Don't forget WCW.
My Blog: http://cynicalclots.blogspot.com
I think he meant Workflow Foundation as opposed to the pathetically fake "professional wrestling" showcase.
Don't forget to vote if the response was helpful
Sig history "dad" Ishmail-Samuel Mustafa Unix is a Four Letter Word, and Vi is a Two Letter Abbreviation "There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance" Ali Ibn Abi Talib
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I think he meant Workflow Foundation as opposed to the pathetically fake "professional wrestling" showcase.
Don't forget to vote if the response was helpful
Sig history "dad" Ishmail-Samuel Mustafa Unix is a Four Letter Word, and Vi is a Two Letter Abbreviation "There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance" Ali Ibn Abi Talib
Yes. My reply was kind of a cheap attempt at a play on words(or acronyms , if you will.) I apologize.
My Blog: http://cynicalclots.blogspot.com
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
When the freakin' IDE breaks when you're trying to design a form, it sucks.
That's really a VS issue there. Have you tried using Expression Blend? It's a lot stabler than VS is for designing WPF UI. What a lot of folks do is to create UI in Blend, and then copy/paste the Xaml into VS.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkYes, but Expression Blend really, really, really sucks. For a UI design tool, its user interface is horrible. Non-standard and counter-intuitive menus and controls, a layout that varies from run to run without rhyme or reason, and a color scheme that is unusable unless you're under the age of 30 and have a very high-end flat panel. I've had more luck coding XAML by hand in Visual Studio than I've had using Expression Blend.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
Yes, but Expression Blend really, really, really sucks. For a UI design tool, its user interface is horrible. Non-standard and counter-intuitive menus and controls, a layout that varies from run to run without rhyme or reason, and a color scheme that is unusable unless you're under the age of 30 and have a very high-end flat panel. I've had more luck coding XAML by hand in Visual Studio than I've had using Expression Blend.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Agreed. Don't forget the intended audience of Expression Blend. Artists, not developers.
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When the freakin' IDE breaks when you're trying to design a form, it sucks. Period.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Use Expression Blend for designing and the IDE for code behind.
Software Kinetics - Moving software
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
When the freakin' IDE breaks when you're trying to design a form, it sucks.
That's really a VS issue there. Have you tried using Expression Blend? It's a lot stabler than VS is for designing WPF UI. What a lot of folks do is to create UI in Blend, and then copy/paste the Xaml into VS.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkThat's a pretty crappy excuse, you must admit. If the VS design time support is unstable, why should anyone bother getting Yet-Another-Microsoft-Tool just to begin learning it? Why should you have to use two different tools, one to "design" the appearance, and another to program the behavior. I agree with John: if the native tool set doesn't work,then it is beta crap that Microsoft is dumping on customers. The fact that they have Expression Blend working makes the offense of not fixing the VS designers in a service pack even less forgivable. This seems to be the only industry in which a supplier can sell defective product to its customers and not get sued. It's a damn good thing Microsoft doesn't build bridges.
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Agreed. Don't forget the intended audience of Expression Blend. Artists, not developers.
Richard Andrew x64 wrote:
Artists,
Any self respecting Artist would be nauseated by Expression Blend. The target audience was clearly color-blind apes, not artists.
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That's a pretty crappy excuse, you must admit. If the VS design time support is unstable, why should anyone bother getting Yet-Another-Microsoft-Tool just to begin learning it? Why should you have to use two different tools, one to "design" the appearance, and another to program the behavior. I agree with John: if the native tool set doesn't work,then it is beta crap that Microsoft is dumping on customers. The fact that they have Expression Blend working makes the offense of not fixing the VS designers in a service pack even less forgivable. This seems to be the only industry in which a supplier can sell defective product to its customers and not get sued. It's a damn good thing Microsoft doesn't build bridges.
Rob Graham wrote:
the only industry in which a supplier can sell defective product to its customers and not get sued.
The good ol' license takes care of that: Microsoft expressly denies any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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Yes, but Expression Blend really, really, really sucks. For a UI design tool, its user interface is horrible. Non-standard and counter-intuitive menus and controls, a layout that varies from run to run without rhyme or reason, and a color scheme that is unusable unless you're under the age of 30 and have a very high-end flat panel. I've had more luck coding XAML by hand in Visual Studio than I've had using Expression Blend.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Man that's such tripe - what freakin Expression are you using? A beta? The UI is fairly standard in terms of colour scheme with a LOT of design / graphics-ish type applications (see Blender for a kick off), and for the record, I'm WELL over 30, and work on a 5 year old laptop with a 15" screen. FWIW it can also be changed. I've never experienced issues with layouts, and would be rather surprised if anyone else does either. I really don't see what you mean about the menus being unintuitive - ffs, use your brain - just because something is different to what you're used to, and you're struggling to get your head around it / understand it, doesn't make it useless. Nish was very right - it's a substantial learning curve, but (as I've said before), WPF is a HELL of a lot better than anything else we have to play with - I KNOW you remember MFC...you're honestly telling me that was a better way to do UIs?
C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.
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That's a pretty crappy excuse, you must admit. If the VS design time support is unstable, why should anyone bother getting Yet-Another-Microsoft-Tool just to begin learning it? Why should you have to use two different tools, one to "design" the appearance, and another to program the behavior. I agree with John: if the native tool set doesn't work,then it is beta crap that Microsoft is dumping on customers. The fact that they have Expression Blend working makes the offense of not fixing the VS designers in a service pack even less forgivable. This seems to be the only industry in which a supplier can sell defective product to its customers and not get sued. It's a damn good thing Microsoft doesn't build bridges.
Rob Graham wrote:
Why should you have to use two different tools, one to "design" the appearance, and another to program the behavior.
That's one of the main POINTS of Expression - most devs couldn't design a decent UI in a fit, and most designers would puke at having to use VS - the point of the shared project / file formats is so that you can code up what you want in VS, then pass to someone with an eye for the aesthetics to tart it up in Expression.
C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.
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Use Expression Blend for designing and the IDE for code behind.
Software Kinetics - Moving software
Easy to say, that's another $500 to shell out for tools.
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Man that's such tripe - what freakin Expression are you using? A beta? The UI is fairly standard in terms of colour scheme with a LOT of design / graphics-ish type applications (see Blender for a kick off), and for the record, I'm WELL over 30, and work on a 5 year old laptop with a 15" screen. FWIW it can also be changed. I've never experienced issues with layouts, and would be rather surprised if anyone else does either. I really don't see what you mean about the menus being unintuitive - ffs, use your brain - just because something is different to what you're used to, and you're struggling to get your head around it / understand it, doesn't make it useless. Nish was very right - it's a substantial learning curve, but (as I've said before), WPF is a HELL of a lot better than anything else we have to play with - I KNOW you remember MFC...you're honestly telling me that was a better way to do UIs?
C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.
I'm not denigrating WPF or XAML at all; in fact, I'm starting to like them. There are a whole lot of things in WPF that are going to make my job a lot easier (I do the UI's for our products). XAML is starting to feel somewhat intuitive, although that may be to my history with XML. Expression Blend, on the other hand, is another kettle of fish. I'm using version 2, with the latest service updates, by the way. I've not used the other Expression applications. The Blend UI has two color scheme choices for itself, 'dark' and 'light'. The dark scheme renders its UI elements in shades of about 15% gray to black. The light scheme renders in the range 30% gray to black. Neither of these choices render well on anything except a good quality flat panel that can handle the contrast requirements. If you mean "the UI can be changed" refers to these choices, well, neither one works. On a standard CRT it is very difficult to visually differentiate UI elements due to the lack of contrast. Disabled UI elements often render identically to elements that simply don't have the focus. I don't understand why they would deliberately ignore the user's appearance preferences. I've used a number of 'designer' applications. Most of them go out of their way to avoid forcing a certain workflow on you. Layout management and consistency is part of that. Blend is heavily sequence dependent. Select this palette here, click on that item in your design, click this toolbar button, in that order, and maybe it will do what you asked. Maybe not. Menu items enable and disable seemingly at random. The online tutorials are difficult to use, since they don't correspond to the application. They routinely mention menu items or toolbar buttons that can't be found, or don't appear when you expect them to. I simply find it ironic when a company creates a tool for doing UI design that treats the user with such contempt.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
...does WPF have to suck as bad as WWF? [EDIT] Ouch - those '1' votes really hurt. I think I'm going to cry... not. Almost an hour later, and WPF still sucks. All the '1' votes in the world won't change that.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001modified on Sunday, December 28, 2008 9:21 AM
WPF is pretty cool . But it's fiddly, the open ended UI means you find you have to play a lot to get simple things done. I still have not figured how to build ui that resizes nicely when you resize a form, I think you need to nest hundreds of docking panels to do that. I acutally did a ton of WPF ui before Xmas, and at one stage spent a day trying to get a complex path onto a button. But, after a hell of a week, I turned the corner and feel I can build WPF UI reasonably well now, although I still have a lot to learn.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.
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Yes, but Expression Blend really, really, really sucks. For a UI design tool, its user interface is horrible. Non-standard and counter-intuitive menus and controls, a layout that varies from run to run without rhyme or reason, and a color scheme that is unusable unless you're under the age of 30 and have a very high-end flat panel. I've had more luck coding XAML by hand in Visual Studio than I've had using Expression Blend.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Non-standard and counter-intuitive menus and controls, a layout that varies from run to run without rhyme or reason, and a color scheme that is unusable unless you're under the age of 30 and have a very high-end flat panel.
Agreed. Keeps reminding me of old versions of Blender; a UI written by programmers who spent too much time with one particular tool and decided to use it for everything.
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You're right. These facts that you've laid out totally contradict the wild ramblings that I pulled off the back of cornflakes packets.
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That's a pretty crappy excuse, you must admit. If the VS design time support is unstable, why should anyone bother getting Yet-Another-Microsoft-Tool just to begin learning it? Why should you have to use two different tools, one to "design" the appearance, and another to program the behavior. I agree with John: if the native tool set doesn't work,then it is beta crap that Microsoft is dumping on customers. The fact that they have Expression Blend working makes the offense of not fixing the VS designers in a service pack even less forgivable. This seems to be the only industry in which a supplier can sell defective product to its customers and not get sued. It's a damn good thing Microsoft doesn't build bridges.
I agree 200%. The Blend/VS thing sucks. Of course, Winforms is just as bad, in terms of the designer breaking when you use it. In WPF, I have found that XAML pasted directly, if moved into a control to clean up the code, will break the designer. I've given up on trying to work out why, I use the designer for preview until it breaks, then live without it.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.
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Easy to say, that's another $500 to shell out for tools.
Even when I got it for free, I still found Blend to be not worth the price, although I sometimes use it to help me with generating paths, it's ability to merge shapes into a path is about the only good thing it does.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.
