There’s been quite a bit of buzz lately about “WPF/E”, or “Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere,” a code word for Microsoft’s newest browser plugin and implementation of their Windows Presentation Foundation. This week, Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of WPF/E. I downloaded and installed their plugin and SDK and decided to see what I could do.

The plugin, and its drawing capabilities, were decidedly Flash-like. However, the documentation led me to believe that the entire “movie” – all the shapes, strokes, motions, and events – must be scripted in Microsoft’s XAML language, as opposed to being created in a nice drawing interface such as Flash or Illustrator would offer.

This couldn’t be. There is no way your average graphic designer would take kindly to coding all of this into XML. In fact most designers shriek, run away, and hide at the very thought of code. There has to be some kind of GUI to do this if WPF/E is ever going to be taken seriously by the design community.

After a bit more investigation, I found that Microsoft recommends “Expression Web Designer” to develop pages and “Expression Web Blend” for creation of WPF/E objects. Of course, this information was buried, in that special MSDN way of hiding information in plain sight. Initially, the Expression pages said that to use Expression Web Designer, one must first install the .NET Framework 2.0, and then install the designer software, and the Expression Web Blend was no longer available.

So after some more downloading, I installed the framework and Expression Designer, and fired it up to have a look at the latest Macromedia-Killer, which turned out to be a clone of Dreamweaver, with no mention of WPF/E anywhere.

After even more investigation, I found the trial download of Expression Blend, once again hidden in MSDN’s own unique way of hiding only the stuff someone might actually want to see, hidden amongst endless blobs of buzzwords and Microsoft horn-tooting. Plus, I now had to upgrade to .NET Framework 3.0.

Another round of downloading and installing, and finally, I was ready to for this ever-so-hyped and cleverly-hidden masterpiece of Microsoft innovation and competition-killing.

What I got was, well, stupid:Microsoft Blend - look familiar?

I always get a kick out the general assumption that monochromatic gray colors automatically makes you “edgy” and “hip.”

Also, I couldn’t find any way to change the fill color of the objects I had drawn onto the Stage …err, sorry, I mean the “Canvas”… The Paint Bucket seemed incapable of its basic Paint Bucket duties.

Scripted events were clumsily assembled in a panel drop-down interface, allowing the user to select first the object, then the event, then the action. For lack of a better example, it reminded me of the email-filtering in Outlook.

On the other hand, I did get an answer to my question: Yes, there is a graphical drawing interface to create XAML for a WPF/E page.

But why would you use it?

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