Announcing touch.codeplex.com
UPDATE: You can follow tanagram on twitter @tanagram https://twitter.com/tanagram.
NOTE: This was cross posted from here .
One of the things I have been trying to do this year is encourage / kick start partners to create useful CodePlex projects. I’ve been digging into Windows 7 multi-touch since it was announced at PDC08. As the managed (.NET) APIs available for WPF 3.5 SP1, Silverlight, and WPF 4 started to materialize, it became clear that there were varying levels of developer productivity for building multi-touch solutions. The eventual release of the WPF 4 + the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch clearly sets the bar for developer productivity thanks to all the great SDK work that was born out of Microsoft Surface. So I started thinking, “What about Silverlight 3/4 & WPF 3.5 SP1 developers?” There are all sorts of reasons why people will end up choosing those platforms. So I thought “There has to be a way to make common touch scenarios easier for them so they don’t have to write the same plumbing code over and over again.” Enter CodePlex and Expression Blend Behaviors. I started talking to my buddy James Chittenden who is the User Experience Evangelist (UXE) on my team. I floated this idea of simplifying common touch scenarios when using WPF 3.5 SP1 or Silverlight 3/4. The general idea was to start a CodePlex project that used Expression Blend Behaviors to provide a consistent way to implement common touch scenarios across WPF & Silverlight. We both agreed we should try to make it happen. James suggested we contact Joseph Juhnke, President & CEO of Tanagram Partners, about the idea. Joseph loved the idea. We all put our heads together and decided to start small with two common multi-touch scenarios that were fairly laborious to implement from scratch in both WPF 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3/4. From there, Tanagram Partners cranked away at building them out. I’m excited to announce that their CodePlex project has gone live:
Go check it out! They’re looking for community feedback.
-Marc