Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

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CHAPTER 8 ■ .NET 3.0: WINDOWS PRESENTATION FOUNDATION
Figure 8-18. Resizing the application
Using Expression Blend to Build a Data
Application
While Blend is a fully featured application development IDE, including the ability to data
bind to XML or object data sources, it isn’t suited for building a full n-tier web application
from end to end. It is more suited for developing the UI and interaction layers, and then
having a developer take the output XAML and “plug it in” to the full application architecture.
For example, if you want Blend to build a WPF front end for a web service, you don’t
have the facility to create a web services proxy. The workflow instead is that the designer
uses Blend to design the interactions, and the developer takes this XAML to produce the
finished application in Visual Studio. In the case of a Web Services consumer, the developer
can provide the designer with an XML document that is an example of what would
be returned from the service, allow the designer to do their thing, and then take the
resulting XAML and plug it into a “real” web service using some C# code.
Here’s a snippet of XML as returned from the web service that you used in Chapter 5—
fronting the AdventureWorks database with a query for address data.