Silverlight 2 Twitter routines

One thing that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers work together on Silverlight projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects to get a strong code-centric. NET development environment, while designers can use expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the same project, using a creative Tools, finely crafted to create an optimized user experience design.

The WPF UI framework that is published in Silverlight further facilitates a good designer/developer workflow by supporting concepts such as layout management, controls, styles, templates, and resources, helping to avoid scenarios where designers and developers interfere with each other in integrating functionality, behavior, and expressive design.

Silverlight 2 Twitter Routines

Last month, I posted an in-depth blog tutorial that taught you how to build a Silverlight 2 Digg app that you can read here. This tutorial is intended primarily for developers, focusing on the basic programming concepts involved in building Silverlight 2 applications.

Today, Celso Gomes and Peter Blois released a cool 10-minute video tutorial showing how to use Expression blend to style a Silverlight 2 Twitter Messenger application. You can watch this video here, and you can download the source code for the Silverlight Twitter application that was completed here.

This video is a good example of how designers can rearrange a Silverlight application without changing the background code. During the styling process, the video also shows some of the powerful features that expression Blend 2 offers to build an extremely rich user experience. Celso starts with the developer version of the application and then customizes and crafted the UI to have a playful Twitter theme:

Application Model

The Silverlight Twitter client is hosted in a asp.net server application that shows a Web service that allows Silverlight Twitter apps communicate with Twitter services (because Twitter does not allow direct access from client applications). The communication between the Silverlight client and the ASP.net Web server is implemented through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

This client application uses the Model-view-presenter (also known as "Model-view-viewmodel" mode), which is a common pattern in large WPF applications. Although this is a very simple application, they still want to take advantage of the flexibility that MVP brings and leave room for future development.

Keeping visual performance and application logic separate, and allowing designers to make more complex visual changes without impacting basic application processes, this video provides examples of the styling flexibility that the architecture facilitates.