In my previous post I was discussing about how to mock test data for persistent objects mapped with Genome. Now I want to discuss how to provide this sample data in Blend so the designer building a front end with WPF actually sees how the UI would look like with data.

We’ve been working on a little research project recently with WPF and created a small (and hopefully handy) application where you can list your contacts synchronized from Microsoft CRM. We store the offline data in a SQL 2005 Compact Edition database and we access the data using Genome.

To make the experiment more exciting we involved a designer in the project, not only to design a cool UI using the features of WPF, but mainly to see how the collaboration between designer and developer works in reality.