Today I finally released the new version of the Birthdays Synchronizer application. As I wrote in previous posts, I wanted to enhance it with a new and exciting UI, and chose WPF for this purpose.
Although my learning curve for this technology was a bit slower than I expected, I’m very pleased with the results 
I used Expression Blend 2 for designing the UI and animation (or storyboard…) and MVVM pattern for the acutal development. While working with WPF I faced more than one gotcha (it has some issues after all..), but eventually I managed to overcome them all. Microsoft did amazing work on this technology, which offers so many possibilities and really changes the way desktop applications are developed and displayed.
Beside the UI changes, the new version also interacts with Google Calendar, allowing to synchronize the birthdays to this calendar in a very special way:
If in a certain day you should be reminded for a friend’s birthday, a little cake will show up on the top of this day reminding you of it. It also shows the picture and name of the person when clicking on it..
In the coming posts I will elaborate more on this integration and some of the things I had to overcome with WPF.
