One of the only problems working for frog is that I most often can’t talk about the work I’m doing because of NDA agreements. But I’m so excited that I can finally talk about some real WPF work that I’ve been doing lately! For the past few months my fellow frogs and I have been working side-by-side with Yahoo to deliver their next generation Yahoo! Messenger client geared especially for Windows Vista. Read more about it at http://messenger.yahoo.com/vista. This has been an amazing project to work on for a multitude of reasons and has taught me so much about real-world WPF development. Below are screenshots from some of the work. Click on them to see them in full effect.

The application is being shown at CES this week in Vegas. It is still not even in beta yet so I can’t provide any code samples or working prototypes. There is also still lots more to be done but the application is looking beautiful and it truly taps into the power of WPF and Windows Vista. Below is a small of example that I can show of the kind of rich UI that was made possible by using WPF. Users will have the ability to customize the look and feel of the application in many ways, but one of the coolest is by using the color picker at the bottom of most windows. Not only can you change the colors of the window chrome but you can also use textures like grass or wood. Trust me, this is not your average color picker! I wish I could post a prototype of this so you can play with it, but not just yet .

It has been so great to work side-by-side with Yahoo on this project. I was even able to go and work onsite at the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale a few times. Thanks to Josh, Matt, Eric, Brian, Chris, Frank and everyone else at Yahoo for making it such a fun project to work on. We also received a great deal of support from Microsoft during the development process. Technical evangelist extraordinaire Karsten Januszewski was our primary point of contact in Redmond. Thanks for answering so many of our questions Karsten! On the frog side our team consisted of 6 team members. I was the primary WPF technologist on the project but was helped out immensely by Doug Cook who is another of our resident WPF experts here at frog. Kalani Kourdus was the visual designer who created all of the kick-ass visuals for the application. Kalani is well-versed in working in Blend so the designer-developer workflow was effortless on this project. Evan Torchin was the primary design analyst who sorted out and arranged all of our crazy ideas into a very useable application. Chris Robbins was the project manager who help keep us all on track. Mark Ligameri, an Executive Creative Director, was the creative lead on the project and provided the vision and design guidance along the way.

Expect many more posts about the project in the future as the noose of the NDA around my neck is slowly loosened . This is definitely a case where the screenshots don’t do the application justice. Once you get your hands on the application I think you’ll really love it. It is really doing some incredibly innovative things in the instant messaging area.

Have fun in Vegas guys!
Lee