It’s all getting a bit frantic here. One week to go before TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona and there’s a bunch of things to do before we go:

• Got to pack, obviously
• Got to host the Birmingham NxtGenUG meeting on Wednesday
• Got to prep up some game shows prior to flying out.
• Need to shoot some footage for some videos we’re going to be showing as part of Speaker Idol
• Got to release Podcast No 43 (VBUG Conference)
• Got to get in 5 good days work!

Never been so busy in me life!  But I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is some really interesting stuff going on at the moment.  For instance …

Expression Blend

Had a good workout with Expression Blend over the weekend, building a NxtGenUG Game Show (To Be Announced at TechEd), and although I am the archetypal developer with 0% Design DNA, I’m quite proud of the result!  There’s a few foibles with it but after a while getting some swanky motion going through the Timeline stuff is pretty easy. Some of the GUI editing in the background of the XAML seems a bit limited sometimes and I had to on occasions dive into the XAML to get it to do exactly what I wanted. It seemed to run OK.  I think it bombed on me once during the whole weekend, which I thought weren’t bad for a first release.

Overall I’m pretty impressed. A few oddities:

• It seemed to refuse to acknowledge the fact that I did have a App.xaml.  Only when I compiled it in VS2008 and reloaded did it want to know, this meant it was a little fiddly to test the application.
• Another little ‘gotcha’ was the Timeline drop down.  Sometimes the Timelines just seemed to disappear, only to reappear when I created a new timeline. 
• I also seemed to get a little stuck when selecting container objects and when I got the yellow banding around my selected object. At one point it wouldn’t let me do anything to the objects within the container.
• Not sure about that grey either … still I suppose I could change it.

Ah well, into the week of weeks, and out the other side into TechEd – hope to see you there

Cheers

Dave