XAML UI designer / developer? We’re hiring!

In 2011, after more than a decade as an independent contractor, I left my current assignment to get employed by a company that, well, sells business cards. And other stuff. Sounds horribly boring? I thought so, too .

But once I got in touch with the people at Vistaprint, I quickly realized that this was the place I wanted to work. I met some of the brightest minds I ever had the pleasure to work with, in a rapidly changing, globally distributed, no-bullshit, getting-things done environment, as part of an extremely agile company that even realized substantial growth during a time of global financial crisis. And I still love it! The only down-side is that I’m burning so hot most of the time that blogging got pretty much to a halt (I’ll do better – after all, I have an employer who explicitly allows me to open source parts of my work).

My work at Vistaprint is focused on the UI architecture of the distributed software system that runs in our factories. Today, we process more than 120,000 individually customized pieces in 70,000 shipments per day, with diverse human-machine interaction taking place while produced items are making their way through the plant. And we are currently trying to rethink the way our UIs should work – which is where YOU come in: A brilliant UI designer, XAML wizard, UX geek, who wants to make a difference and join us in implementing  an exciting, cutting edge UI infrastructure that will support both our stakeholders on the factory floor as your fellow developers all around the globe. Recognize yourself? Come join us in our beautiful Winterthur office in Switzerland!

Job details here: http://careers.vistaprint.com/winterthur/technology/ui-software-engineer-.net/7121

I’m about to release my own take on coroutines, and as a complementary app, I created a very simple sample that lets developers (hopefully) experience the fundamental behavioral difference of returning a sequence of values through the yield keyword.

There’s a lot of great material that can be read about iterator blocks (Google is your friend), and I’m not planning to add another article on top of that. So, stop reading and:

• Download the sample (VS2010).
• Quickly glance at the few lines in the code-behind of the window.
• Run the app.
• Bow in front of the power of iterators

Download Sample Application

I finally got round to implement on-the-fly text formatting for Sketchables, which will  allow you to define text formatting while typing (similar to wikis or forum posts). Sketchables will parse such strings and format them on the fly for you:

the star renders *bold* text

I didn’t rely on regular expressions here, but wrote a simple forwarding parser to process markup text. As it makes a pretty neat tool, I extracted it into a little sample app that shows a possible use for it. The presented implementation just creates nested text blocks, but you should be able to easily adjust it to your needs.

Latest Update:  2010.11.07 – Fixed issue with single character chunks.

Download Sample Application

The blog (and myself) has been dormant a while – I’ve been literally working my *** off (doing over 600 hours in just two months isn’t too healthy) and have rewarded myself by travelling the US for three weeks. However, I’m back in Switzerland now and will try to reply to pending posts and questions asap (read: once I get rid of my current sleep deprivation), along with an update on Sketchables.

I wanted to officially release Sketchables weeks ago, but business just got in the way – and it turned out that my plan to just working at night / on weekends didn’t work either because, well, business got in the way there, too.

However, my deadline ends in little more than a week (and I’ll have quite some time at my hands in August), so I’ll be able to finally package Sketchables, record some more videos, and of course add a few goodies. For now, I’ve prepared a preview release of the package which already works quite solid:

Sketchables Preview

If you compare this package to the contents in the YouTube video, the most prominent addition is built-in navigation support which gives you point-and-click navigation, and allows you to trigger other actions for a Sketchable’s items:

(Click on screenshot to show in full size)

As always, critical feedback is appreciated – happy sketching!

SketchFlow is a great addition to Blend, but I was missing the ability to create quick mockups of user interfaces. I’m a huge fan of productivity tools such as Balsamiq, and I was sorely missing its ease and speed in SketchFlow.

Meet Sketchables. Sketchables is a simple framework complemented by a set of controls that allow you to quickly create common controls in a matter of seconds. Here’s a screenshot from one of the samples, which was created in just a few minutes:

…and here’s a complementary recording that shows how the above mockup was created:

Sketchables will be free software, requires Blend 4 RTM and fully supports both WPF and Silverlight SketchFlow projects. Version 1.0 is approaching completion, so I hope I’ll be able to release it as soon as Blend 4 goes live.

Still time for you to slip in some last-minute feature requests though