Tooling and integration with Visual Studio to kickstart WPF development (by a Belgian firm) – an interview

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Last week I invited David Sleeckx, the technical architect behind Vidyano, to give us a demonstration on what he has been working on. Vidyano is a tool that is tightly integrated with Visual Studio 2008 to help with the (rapid) development and architecturing of windows applications using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in the presentation layer and LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework or even something custom data access layer for the model.

Ever since I got to see the first demo of this tool, I was impressed with the capabilities and decided it was time to get a demo on video. David joined me last week to explain the concepts of the tool as well as give a demo from the ground up.

We decided to create two videos, one in Dutch and one in English. Here are the links to the videos:

vydiano_interview vydiano_interview
Interview in Dutch Interview in English

As you will see in the video(s), David builds a new application from the ground up to show how the Vidyano tool works. One very important point to note is that by the fact that the tool uses XAML for the presentation layer and these views are in a complete separate project, they can be passed on to a designer to edit the look and feel through Expression Blend.

Check out the video in your preferred language, knowing that the Dutch version is longer and contains more demos. David also shows two projects they did using the Vidyano tool for their own clients, both are for the medical industry and what surprised me most was the amount of time it took to develop them.

In case you would like to try the tool, download the free trial and check out the step by step tutorial to create a project. The tutorial explains the process of creating a LINQ to SQL model, creating the Vidyano module, adding pages with a chosen layout structure, and running the project.

Vidyano is created by Rhea (a member of the Visual Studio Industry Partner Program) and you can find the product on the Visual Studio Gallery.