Sample Data Previews in Expression Blend 3

I am so glad there are people smarter than I am.  Especially folks that are working on Blend and who knew I would be posting about sample data, and how that might work. 

And the fact that they were working on it for months before I ever piped up. :oD

Expression Blend 3 does the exact thing that I was hoping Microsoft would integrate into the designers for WPF: sample data can now be auto-generated for you, or you can specify an XML file to populate the design-time data.

Schweet.

Here’s Soma’s preview from his blog…and an inexplicitly long set of gripes from people who obviously haven’t upgraded their IDE since Visual Interdev…

For those that are highly critical I encourage you to dive a little deeper than what's at the surface here. Templating, binding, providers, extensible components, the frameworks and base classes now provided, and now behaviours...there are a lot of great tools here.  I've been using .Net since 2001 and have deployed apps with up to 10,000 users.  It has come a long way, but you have to take off your "Here's what I know" cap and adopt the new functionality.

I remember when a friend got Vista, an upgrade from Win95.  She refused to start using the new document folders and insisted on using her old DOS-style directory structure for storing.  When she finally let go and adopted the new style of organization she was pleasantly surprised…

Open a Project in Expression Blend from Visual Studio

If you work in both Blend and Visual Studio you will notice that there are significant gaps in functionality between the two.  In Blend you get a rich design and animation interface (and it looks way cooler, too) but don’t get some of the much-needed development tools.  In Visual Studio, you get productivity-focused tools like intellisense but lose out on easy storyboard manipulation and the like.

Basically, if you do at least a little of design and a little of development, you need to be running both Expression Blend and Visual Studio.

From within Blend there are a number of actions that will result directly in Visual Studio opening (such as drilling into a click event on a button) if you have Visual Studio installed.  However, Visual Studio doesn’t reciprocate the favour when you’re looking for something more design-friendly.

To open your project in Blend directly from Visual Studio, you’ll need to hack together an external tool link.

Go to Tools –> External Tools in Visual Studio and add a new entry to the menu contents.  You can set your title to whatever you like (I used Send to &Blend).  Your Command should be set to the path for the EXE where you have Blend installed.  Lastly, set the Arguments property to the following:

$(ProjectDir)$(ProjectFileName)

…which will tell Visual Studio to pass the current project path and name to Blend as it opens the project.

Happy Blending!