Blend 4 Thoughts – SketchFlow and Sample Data
So Blend 3 has helped in the Designer/Developer pairing world we live in today. However there are still issues that Microsoft need to improve in Blend 4:
- Sample Data – It’s a nice feature, but wouldn’t it be nice to run in Live Mode or Sample Model at any point during development/design? Today you can only run in one of the other
- SketchFlow is driven by SketchStyles.xaml coupled with the various additional windows/features available in Blend (SketchFlow Map etc). In an agile project, the entire application is not SketchFlow’d prior to development commencing. Hence what often happens is that some screens are in SketchFlow, some screens are styled, and some screens are MVVM. Running with a Blend SketchFlow and a Blend Silverlight Application project feels like there is to much space between the IA and design/developer world
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http://geekswithblogs.net/lbugnion/archive/2009/09/05/detecting-design-time-mode-in-wpf-and-silverlight.aspx
It would be really nice to be able to easily switch data sources. As my prototype evolves and I get it in the hands of different user groups, I need to show them different volumes of data. 10 or 100 records in the sample data is very different than 15,000 which is what I might need to show in a production environment.