Is there any guidance available on developing Metro styled silverlight applications? How does one go about designing the UI to match the metro look and feel of WP7. Going by the way windows 8's UI & UX is, I assume the future of how we develop applications for the future versions of the win OS might be changing to look more or less 'metro'.
So what I am asking is, if anyone knows of any resource or has any ideas on how to use the currently available silverlight controls to achieve that look and feel. Is there anything planned to change the controls to match that UX out of the box and more natively?
As you know Metro is not tied to any technology. You can reference WP7 UI guidelines to get some hints; a new version of the guideline is available from Microsoft web site.
For Silverlight 4, you can download themes from Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=e9da0eb8-f31b-4490-85b8-92c2f807df9e
The Cosmopolitan theme when applied to a Silverlight4 application will give you Metro UI.
You can either apply the theme as-is or have a look in the xaml resource files to see how the theme is designed (brushes, fonts, styles etc)
For good UI (including Metro concepts and Blend) reference, I recommend visiting http://www.riagenic.com/
I hope this helps.
Have you missed this session?
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-790C
It shows step-by-step how a WP7 (~Silverlight) application can be be turned into a Metro-style application. Although it doesn't go into design principles.
Edit: haha, missed to see that this question was asked months ago, sorry.
Infragistics have published a free metro theme for Silverlight.
Related
has anyone built a profile using metro ui css, i need some inspiration for an online management system using metro and not able to come across much online. Thanks.
Not necessarily using the Metro UI CSS however these examples will hopefully provide inspiration that you could use to design your own.
Metro drew on clean typography and geometry - heavy use of the grid system and white-space. As Metro has matured it's moved on from the original designs, however Microsoft have continued to champion those original concepts - check out their guidelines for developing apps, and you might find exploring their products Windows Phone, Xbox One, and the Windows 10 redesign that got leaked - This one in-particular has quite a few ideas for profiles.
I first started reading about Metro from Long Zheng's blog - istartedsomething.com. And through him I discovered Mike Guss. Guss was one of the initial designers of the Metro language. He's recently updated his website and has some great Metro work on there:
http://mike-guss.com/#windows-phone
http://mike-guss.com/#xbox-one-1
Apparently there are quite a few "Metro" front-ends, inspiration found here: https://www.sitepoint.com/metro-bootstraps/
A couple examples here:
https://juliankay.com/development/the-metro-inspired-interface/
And more here:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=metro+inspired+user+interface
I am coming from desktop dev background, wpf/SLight, and looking at switching to MVC application. Given I am absolutely rubbish at making stuff "pretty" what would be the best toolkit/widgets to invest in to help me on my way?
Looking for ease of use; UI look and feel; price?
I have experience with following control toolkit.
JQuery with JQuery UI : http://jqueryui.com/ Free and open source. Lot of community support, Lot of plugin to extend. you have more control over plugins and code. Very light. I have extensively use several mvic projects and I do recommend.
MVC controls toolkit. : http://mvccontrolstoolkit.codeplex.com/ - Free and open source code plex projects that you can use your mvc application.
DEvexprss mvc extension. http://mvc.devexpress.com/ : Commercial product with all necessary control for mvc application. Learning curve is bit high. But you can get very nice look for your application easily. Customization is difficult. They have good support from you technical issues. I have use for projects.
Kendo UI : http://www.kendoui.com/ commercial product from Telerik. I haven’t use in commrical project this but seems good.
One of the most popular UI frameworks is Twitter Bootstrap (FREE). It is built on top of jQuery and has lots of pretty widgets that are easy to use.
Another framework I like to use is KendoUI from Telerik (Price depends on what you need). It is very declarative so you simply need to add attributes to your html elements and it will take care of styling for you.
We are a Win8 & WP8 (new) development shop that must develop a one-of internal use only LOB app that runs on Win7 (preferably out of browser). Since most of our client-side app knowledge is with XAML/MVVM, I'm thinking our best option for that app is to do it in SL5.
So, how much of our XAML/MVVM knowledge can we leverage for SL5 development? Can we actually share some amount of code between SL5 & Win8 if we design with MVVM clearly in mind? What are the pitfalls?
Silverlight? No need.
The answer is simple and straightforward. Move as much logic and types into one or more portable class library projects. These can be used on WP8, Windows Store apps, and desktop apps, so there will be minimal effort using them in these types of applications.
For windows 7, go with WPF for your UI. You may find that the API is slightly awkward to deal with, as it lacks the asynchronous patterns that you have to use for WP8/WS applications, however developing the UI via xaml is exactly the same. I don't think you'll find much of a difference at all between the two.
We can’t just leave our customers that are not able to upgrade to windows 8 for a long time in the larch. However there is demand for a “tablet”/”touch” version of our app.
So how can we support both touch with Metro on Windows 8 and our current customers from a single code base?
When WPF come out, after a lot of “Pushing” Microsoft saw since and make it work on Windows XP – has anything like this been talked about for WinRT.
(I am not expecting any solution to work on XP, as XP support is being wound down.)
See Also: Can the ARM version of Windows 8 only run Metro (WinRt) style apps?
The best answer is that you do not want the same application to run on Windows 7 and Windows 8 Metro style. The UI that works best for mouse and keyboards (windows 7) will not work well for a touch-first presentation and visa versa. It is important to re-imagine the UI for the two different worlds.
That said, you have 2 options if you want to share a lot of the code:
1) Write it largely in JavaScript/HTML5. This will let you re-use many of the assets (especially the business logic parts).
2) Write it in (desktop) Silverlight. The Silverlight XAML is closest to Windows XAML. WPF is further away and will require more re-work later.
In either case, you should look at and follow the principles used when writing cross-platform code. Understand the platform dependencies and isolate them behind indirection boundaries. You want to localize all of the code that will have to change. For instance, you don't want calls to the .Net System.IO.File APIs which you know will have to change to Windows.System.Storage calls being scattered throughout your code. Instead, you want it localized in one function that can be modified later.
The only way I can think of is to implement your application in HTML5/CSS3/JS, and avoid using WinRT APIs inasmuch as possible - this may be feasible depending on what, exactly, your app needs to do (e.g. portable 2D graphics is easy with HTML5 canvas).
Then, for Win8, you'll package this as Metro web app. For Win7 and below, you write a simple app that embeds your browser of choice (not IE9, since it doesn't work on XP - so Firefox or Chrome) with all chrome hidden, and loads your HTML5 app inside that embedded browser.
As others have noted, you would not want to have exactly the same application working in Win8 Metro and Win7 / Vista Desktop. If you structure your application properly, using a suitabel design pattern, it is possible to share quite a bit of code between the various version that you would require. For the Win8 version, you will be using WinRT, for Win7 / Vista you have a choice of Silverlight or WPF.
I have published a couple of articles that demonsrate how this can be done, they include quite a bit of code as well:
XAMLFinance – A Cross-platform WPF, Silverlight & WP7 Application - while this article does not cover Win8, it does share code from WPF to Windows Phone 7, which is a very similar problem.
TweetSearch – A Cross platform Metro UI WinRT and Silverlight Application - this article shows how to use the same techniques to share code between WinRT and Silverlight
It is unlikely that we'll see Microsoft push the Metro-style
application framework back to past releases due to the level of
re-architecting that went into Windows 8.
I agree with Zac on this point. It appears Microsoft is definitely pushing both the technology and usability forward with the introduction of Windows 8 (and Windows Runtime).
The Metro UI is a different UI paradigm. If your using the current
Win32 controls (which includes WPF controls), your application will
look really dated in Metro. The only way to fix that is to
re-implement the UI (your View classes in an MVVM design) using Metro
controls. However, C# and majority of the .NET APIs are first class
citizens in this new environment. The rest of your application should
be fine.
As you already have what I assume a rather large application your best solution would be separate your view from your model-viewmodel. Then you can continue to develop both Windows 8 Metro full-screen touch-friendly awesome interfaces and the "classic" window interface (what we have done for the last x number of years). With good separation, design, and an excellent source control solution (i.e. Perforce) you will able to share a lot of the code base.
In addition to the answers given to your recent question on Windows Runtime Bill Wagner (one of the many C# bloggers that I follow) has posted summary on WinRT and managed languages conference sessions; it is an good read and recommended if you have a few minutes. One of the things that his summary clarified (in the FAQ at the end) was that the future of .NET as the branding for the framework we use is going to be replaced with Windows Runtime.
Another piece from Bill's blog post:
Some of the .NET APIs are changing for WinRT. I don’t have an
exhaustive list, and I’m not sure there is one yet. Other APIs are not
exposed via WinRT. (They are still available as .net APIs, just not as
Metro / WinRT APIs.)
It is unlikely that we'll see Microsoft push the Metro-style application framework back to past releases due to the level of re-architecting that went into Windows 8.
Like Pavel said, if you kept your application from using as much of the WinRT libraries as possible, it is possible but then again, you're now building a regular web app.
Are there any libraries available that can help to change the look-and-feel of Desktop Applications made using VB.net 2008? Here is a snapshot of an application that runs on Windows 7:
I think its made using the .net framework, but how can it be styled like this?
PS - Even if its not built using .net framework, then please let me know which language supports the UI customization on windows platform.
NOTE - As everyone is suggesting me to go with WPF or SWING using JAVA, I still want to know if its possible in VB.net WinForms or not.
Theme handlers (Use standard controls and the handler takes care of the visual UI):
Open source
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/FancyNetForms.aspx
Closed source
http://www.appface.com/ ($ 149 USD) (Skin your app with 2 lines of code)
Special controls that has built in theaming:
ComponentOne:
http://www.componentone.com/SuperProducts/StudioWinForms/
Infragistics:
http://www.infragistics.com/
I don't know how this specific window was styled, but there are many posibilities:
Maybe was made in WPF. Microsoft WPF are available since VS2008 and Framework 3.0 and it allow to make a complete look and feel customization for every control that you use.
Maybe It was made in winforms using a custom control set. For example, DevExpress has a set of 60 free controls that comes with some predefined look and allow creating your own skin. (60 Free Controls)
Maybe It just was made in Java with Swing (look this Question)