My company product, at its core, is the foundation for developing metadata-based user interfaces. I do not know how to characterize it less succinctly, and I hope that I will not need this for the purposes of this issue, but we will see.
I tried to speed up work in WPF and prototyped the user interface here and there, and recently I decided to see if I could use Expression Blend to help develop these user interfaces. And I'm pretty puzzled at this moment.
It seems to me that Expresssion Blend is designed taking into account that you already know all the objects that will be present in the user interface during development. But our program dynamically generates this object at runtime.
For example, a row of data can be represented in a horizontal StackPanel containing the variables TextBlocks (for captions) and TextBoxes (for data fields). The number of these objects depends on the metadata about the number of columns in the data row. I can, quite easily, write code that goes through the recording of metadata and dynamically populates the StackPanel, setting up the binding of all controls to properties in the data or metadata. (The width of the TextBox can be bound to metadata, and the text can be bound to data.)
But I can’t even figure out how to do this in Expression Blend. I can manually create all these controls, so I have a set of controls in which I can apply styles and develop the visual design of the application, but it really hurts for that.
I can write code that goes through my data model and emits XAML for all of these controls, I suppose, then copy and paste it. But I will feel really stupid if it turns out that Expression Blend has a way to do such things, and I stepped back and lost because I'm too dull to figure out the right way to think about it.
Is this enough information for someone to try to formulate an answer?