Does Expression Encoder fall into the same bucket? Is it possible to write plugins / extensions to the UI?
What I've always wanted to do is create a Silverlight host within encoder, allow for all the richness of encoder to record a Silverlight application in full quality and with automation hooks. I'm aware of the encoder SDK to essentially do command line encoding, but I'm wondering about extending the WPF app itself. Does encoder even support the admin command or folder? John. -----Original Message----- From: ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com [mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com] On Behalf Of Scott Barnes Sent: Wednesday, 7 April 2010 12:05 PM To: ozSilverlight; carl.scarl...@bankwest.com.au; jo...@follesoe.no Cc: David Pugmire Subject: RE: How to hack Expression Blend. I love where this is going :) I think agreement is there around what you're saying. I think ideally the end point for the extensibility is that having the full control over the PropertyGrid area for "My" control is the ideal shared goal. In that if I'm engaged to work with customer and they have existing developers and my role is to fix the UI related issues with a given project, I'd like to walk in with the ability to aggregate existing controls (whether Microsoft or 3rd party), style them and then at the same time provide some level of locked down control which essentially "Do not touch unless you know what you're doing design wise" to help protect developer art from creeping into my SL/WPF mona-lisa :) That or if you provided custom 3rd party controls into an existing project you'd like to tidy up the way its used etc without exposing the full metadata for the control (at times having the .design extension to a project isn't always available given you'd impact the existing code base in a more aggressive manner than allowed). anyway we can go deeper if you want :) just name when/where the next software review is :) hehe ________________________________________ From: ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com [ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com] On Behalf Of Peter Blois [pete...@microsoft.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 5:48 PM To: carl.scarl...@bankwest.com.au; ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com; jo...@follesoe.no Cc: David Pugmire Subject: RE: How to hack Expression Blend. Yes, but in order to do this though we need to define what the extensibility scenarios need to be, define the APIs, lock them down (so we don’t break extensions between releases), then document them. Doesn’t seem too hard except that everyone seems to be looking for completely different extensibility points and we can’t afford to lock down every API we have. We’re slowly making progress and hoping that the limited hackability that’s in there now will help us define the scenarios and goals when we do start in earnest. From: carl.scarl...@bankwest.com.au [mailto:carl.scarl...@bankwest.com.au] Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 5:26 PM To: ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com; jo...@follesoe.no; Peter Blois Cc: David Pugmire Subject: RE: How to hack Expression Blend. Awesome. Is there any plans to support extensibility in Expression for future releases? Love Snoop and Rooler by the way! Carl. From: ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com [mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com] On Behalf Of Peter Blois <pete...@microsoft.com> Sent: Wednesday, 7 April 2010 1:38 AM To: Jonas Follesø <jo...@follesoe.no>; ozSilverlight <ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com> Cc: David Pugmire <da...@microsoft.com> Subject: RE: How to hack Expression Blend. My earlier response bounced and I forgot to resend ☹ Just to call out the official messaging around this- the Blend addin APIs are completely unsupported and very prone to breaking between releases, with service packs, etc. But if you’re curious about poking around, a good starting point would be to take a look at the PrototypingPackage class in Microsoft.Expression.Prototyping.HostEnvironment.dll using Reflector. You should be able to get things into the scene using the selection service which will give you access to SceneNodes (or SceneElements), from which you can get the ModelItem (SceneNodeModelItem) which allows you to use the documented ModelItem extensibility APIs available to artboard adorners and such. There’s also some interesting techniques here<http://geekswithblogs.net/tkokke/archive/2010/04/01/building-a-ldquorealrdquo-extension-for-expression-blend.aspx> which could be useful. Again, none of this is fully supported! From: Jonas Follesø [mailto:jo...@follesoe.no] Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 11:54 PM To: ozSilverlight Cc: Peter Blois; David Pugmire Subject: Re: How to hack Expression Blend. Interesting approach Scott, thanks for sharing! Did some Blend hacking back in 2008 to do the Colorful addin (http://colorful.codeplex.com/), and at the time extensibility was fairly limited. It looks like this is at least a bit better (hopefully we'll have some documentation when Blend 4.0 RTM?). I couldn't figure out how to programatically add custom XAML to the open document/App.xaml or any resource dictionary. So they way I managed to integrate the add-in was through drag-and-drop and spying on the clipboard. So in general I produce XAML on the clip board Blend can understand. Having an API giving you DOM like access would be awesome. - Jonas On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Scott Barnes <scott.bar...@readify.net<mailto:scott.bar...@readify.net>> wrote: Adding two Microsoft Rockstars whom may find the below of interest - or not .. ;) hehe Pete: what's your thoughts on David's approach below in the url? dangerous or safe? http://davidburela.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/guide-to-creating-expression-blend-3-addins/ David / All, heh funny how we're both attacking blend from different angles and kind of arrive at the same entry point - yet - didn't talk to one another once about it.. Go Readify! ☺ I think your approach is much cleaner than walking the VisualTree like mine and I'm pretty sure yours is the "supported" way of doing things (i.e. Blend's not likely to introduce breaking changes to its current structure - so I've been told). I'd love to see Blend take on even more of an extensibility than it has today, in that for example: [CategoryVisibility("Font",false)] [CategoryVisibility("Common Properties",false)] [CategoryPanel(typeof(MyPanel),"Panel Name","Description")] public class ConsoleWindow : ContentControl { This would effectively inject your own Panel into the Property Grid. As I think if we had a basic SDK/API to tap into and route actions through, we could keep a tighter control over how UserControl's Turnkeys work etc. Then using API's like: MyCustomControlTag tag = new MyCustomControlTag(); tag.SetType(typeof(MyCustomControl)); tag.Name = "Item01"; tag.MyCustomProperty = new MyValue(); BlendVisualDOMHelper.CreateElement(myParentTag, tag, new TagOrderAttribute(TagOrder.Later), TreeBrowseable.No); This would also allow as to write XAML through a controlled set of approaches (Much like HTML DOM access today). • We new-up a MyCustomControlTag which inherits a BaseTag class (usual UserControl / Control properties etc attached). • We define the "Type" so that it can auto-resolve the xmlns="" for us before injecting it into your XAML at design-time. • We can access our "Custom" properties as they derive from MyCustomControl • We then Inject this into the XAML DOM via BlendVisualDOMHelper through a factory method - CreateElement. • We then feed in the tag and make sure its attached to its ParentNode. • We then feed in an Ordering attribute (I quite like how PropertyOrder works today in Design-time projects for given properties) • We then define whether or not this node is "Visible" on the Objects & Timeline hierarchy as at times we want to make knucklehead tags visible while at the same time for tags with basic functionality we often may opt out - having the choice would be great. Combine these two concepts together and I'd be pretty happy with the way in which I could mutate Expression Blend and do functional things to enable me to keep a tighter reign over framework usage for both developers and designers - essentially force-fit them into following a set path vs. giving them 101 properties they can tweak as well it at times is unnecessary and often causes more pain than its worth. eg: I managed to customize Blend for my "ConsoleWindow" control i'm writing: [cid:image001.jpg@01CAD5B0.544DB6A0] That's all she wrote - in that you can't access anything else via Blend. You'd have to actually go in via Code to do it and i figure if you try doing things via that route well all bets are off anyway. From: ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com> [mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com>] On Behalf Of David Burela Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 6:47 PM To: ozSilverlight Subject: RE: How to hack Expression Blend. Along a similar path, here are my notes on how to create your own addins for expression blend http://davidburela.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/guide-to-creating-expression-blend-3-addins/ -David Burela From: ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com> [mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com>] On Behalf Of Tim Heuer Sent: Friday, 2 April 2010 4:36 AM To: ozSilverlight Subject: RE: How to hack Expression Blend. Awesome. Tim Heuer | +1 (602) 405-4567 | Microsoft Silverlight blog: http://timheuer.com/blog/ | twitter: @timheuer<http://twitter.com/timheuer> From: ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com> [mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight-boun...@ozsilverlight.com>] On Behalf Of Scott Barnes Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2010 6:58 AM To: ozSilverlight Subject: FYI: How to hack Expression Blend. In case any of you are curious, here's some basic "how to" on hacking Expression Blend's UI, tonight I wrote a quick blog post documenting it (ie you can really goof around with the UI inside the tool) How to hack Expression Blend - http://bit.ly/9e4GQd Would love to know if any of you are tinkering around in this space as well? any insights/tips? _______________________________________________ ozsilverlight mailing list ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com> http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ ozsilverlight mailing list ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com<mailto:ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com> http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight _______________________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Bankwest Email Security System. _______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ ozsilverlight mailing list ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight _______________________________________________ ozsilverlight mailing list ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight
