Visual Studio 2015 has some new features for developers. This raises the question: Which of the new features will help making my life as developer easier? And which features could be left out?

Have you ever thought about switching from Windows Forms (WinForms) to WPF seriously? Try something new and stop to develop along the old well known patterns? To be honest until a few months ago, I haven’t had any thoughts about making a transition. I was very familiar with Windows Forms and WPF would have been […]

No doubt, when creating software, there is always one topic that everybody talks about: performance. In this respect, even though Windows tries to hide a lot of performance optimization work from the developer’s eyes (when developing for .NET with WPF), there are still a dozen of issues to be kept in mind when implementing a […]

In one of our previous blog articles we talked about the use of pie menus in touch screen interfaces and discussed pros and cons of this kind of interaction. In this article, we are going to show a concrete example of how a pie menu can be used.

Keeping the background information of the previous article in mind, assume you want to make use of Blend to design a NUI based on Silverlight or WPF that lets you easily manipulate items on the screen. In the beginning, you won’t even touch the tool at all – you “invent” whatever gesture you think is […]

Every user interface designer is familiar with the procedure to some extent: To find out what a user interface needs to look and behave like it’s certainly a good idea to create a prototype and evaluate it with potential users. Users will tell you what’s still nagging them and therefore should be improved before coding […]

In the previous part I took a closer look at how and to what extent Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Flex Builder offer pixel-graphics and vector-graphics tools to enable GUI designers to create modern user interfaces. In addition I outlined the concept of 9-Slice-Scaling, a method to make pixel graphics scalable without any quality loss. […]

This series of blog articles deals with the use of GUI development tools by designers and developers, with a particular focus on Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Flex Builder. In the first part, I will have a look at the cooperation between designers and developers during GUI creation, describe some issues that can affect their […]