Last night's VistaSquad User Group Meeting was fun! - Ray demonstrated Expression Blend

Ray Booysen gave an excellent demonstration showing the wonders of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Ray used a beta version of Microsoft Expression Blend to create a simple application without writing ANY code. I was impressed to see how he graphically created a user interface, bound it to an XML schema and data all with live preview.

Ray described WPF as being like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for applications enabling you to separate the presentation of your application from the business logic.

Blend created an eXtensible Application Mark up Language (XAML) file which could be rendered in the browser - this file contained all of the layout information for the interface together with the data bindings.

The demonstration included defining mouse over effects, mirroring of content all based on WPF's vector graphics.

It's well worth joining the VistaSquad both online and at their next User Group meeting as they cater for the needs of both developers and IT Professionals who are interested in Vista.