Creating a Mock-up and Prototyping

In the sample provided with this book, the Expression Blend prototype application is a project created and managed in Blend; you may have it inside the production solution, which will include two different project types for WPF—the production UI and the SketchFlow UI application. I prefer to keep these two types of projects separate because I don't like to mix the prototype with the production application.

First you need to open Expression Blend and create a new application of type WPF SketchFlow Application; this is available in the WPF application templates list if you have the Ultimate version of Blend; if you haven't already, you can still download the 60-day trial version of Blend.

When you create a new WPF prototype application, Blend will create two projects for you in one solution. The first project is of type WPF application, and it is just a bootstrapper for a SketchFlow player. The second project is a class library that contains all the available views that will be displayed by the SketchFlow player; in our case, you will give it the name of TimeTrackerPrototype.