Very cool to see that this week’s episode of This Week on Channel 9 feature BugCamSmash along with Rene Schulte’s Augmented Reality Proof of Concept.
An extra treat though was to see they also featured the videos from the Visual Studio Ecosystem Summit. The summit is all about extending .NET development tools, like Visual Studio and Expression Blend, with your own Add-Ins and custom control support.
Unni Ravidranathan, a program manager on the Blend team, presented and the video as available on Ch 9: VSX107: Extending the Design Capabilities of Blend 3
Below are my rough notes from his talk. For more information on Blend Extensibility check out the video and definitely take a look at Unni’s blog.
- Toolbox
- permanent installation
- descriptions
- custom icons
- categorization
- Design Surface
- Adorners
- Context Menus
- Design Mode Value Provider
- Property Grid
- Project and Item templates
- Applies to Controls, Behaviors and Shaders
- Consistent API between WPF and Silverlight
- shared with Visual Studio 2010
- Side by Side support with Blend 2 and VS2008
- Blend Only features
- AlternateContent Property
- Toolbox Category
- Number Ranges/Increments
- More to come in Blend 4!
Creating a Blend Extensible sample is definitely on my list and I have a few ideas of what I’d like to create. I need to finish explaining how BugCamSmash works first though, so far I’ve left out the juiciest parts (WebCam and Performance).
