Adoption of Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Speeds Development, Enhances Developer-Designer Collaboration.

Andrew Thauer

Dundas, an advanced data visualization and business dashboard solutions company, wanted to improve its user experience and enhance developer-designer collaboration while leveraging its current tools investment. Dundas decided to add Microsoft® Expression Ultimate™ to its workflow, complementing the company’s other Microsoft products and technologies, including Microsoft Visual Studio® and Silverlight®. The addition of Expression technology during the development of the Dundas Dashboard software platform delivered several key benefits, including increased developer productivity, improved developer-designer collaboration, and a more compelling user interface—all of which have enhanced the company’s ability to bring rich, quality products to market more quickly.

Business NeedsDundas Data Visualization produces data visualization and dashboard solutions that have been rapidly adopted by Fortune Global 500 companies around the world. The company's flagship product, Dundas Dashboard, offers a wide variety of highly customizable visualizations for dashboard projects which take advantage of the Microsoft Silverlight development platform. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Dundas has won numerous awards, including “Best of Tech-Ed” in Business Intelligence at the Microsoft Tech-Ed North America 2010 conference.

Prior to adopting Expression Studio 4 Ultimate, Dundas’s development process utilized Visual Studio almost exclusively and the majority of its graphic design-related tasks required the involvement of both developers and designers. The graphic designers would use Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks to create mockups, which the software developers would then manually map into the applications. Not only was the workflow inefficient, Dundas recognized that its internal flow of information and assets was

inefficient as well. In order to ensure greater efficiency and more effective collaboration, Dundas needed the ability to make design changes more quickly. The company lacked the design tools that could improve productivity across teams and roles, as well as allow its graphic designers’ visions to be fully realized. Given the strong relationship Dundas had already established with Microsoft, the company chose to build its future using Microsoft products.

SolutionBy adopting Expression Studio 4 Ultimate, Dundas enabled its designers and developers to collaborate more seamlessly. The Expression tools allow Dundas’s graphic designers to experiment and make adjustments without significantly increasing developers’ time in integrating those changes back into the program.

“Expression Studio helps to bridge the gap between developers and designers,” says Andrew Thauer, Senior Software Developer for Dundas. “It allows designers to create rich applications, while also allowing developers to work with the tools they are

Customer: DundasWebsite: www.dundas.comCustomer Size: 1-99Country or Region: United StatesIndustry: Information Technology

Customer ProfileDundas is an advanced data visualization and business dashboard solutions company.

Software and Services Microsoft Visual Studio− Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Other Products− Microsoft Expression Studio 4

Ultimate Technologies− Microsoft Silverlight for Windows

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies

Microsoft ExpressionCustomer Solution Case Study

Dundas Data Visualization

familiar with. The combination of Visual Studio and Expression Studio complement each other very well.”

BenefitsSince adopting Expression Studio, Dundas has seen increased developer productivity, improved developer-designer collaboration, and the resulting rich graphical experience its dashboard and data visualization solutions can offer users.

Increased Developer ProductivityThauer reports that Blend provides a highly efficient user experience and workflow for developers and designers alike. Because the toolset is familiar, the company experienced no productivity loss due to training or ramp-up time, and Dundas’s developers have found they no longer need to be overly concerned about the small details of styling and design. The greatest advantage, according to Thauer, is the developers’ ability to “use Blend as a sandbox to test the appearance and behavior of our primitive and data visualization controls before integrating them into our core enterprise product.”

Improved Developer-Designer CollaborationBlend’s ability to open Visual Studio projects has also been extremely useful, allowing both developers and designers to work in a more collaborative manner. Designers are able to work directly with XAML in the same Visual Studio project that a developer writes code in. In this way, the graphic designers are able to work more closely to the actual final application than was previously possible. In addition, the new workflow options have reduced both the number of design iterations and the time developers must spend integrating design and styling elements.

Rich User InterfaceSince Dundas’s flagship business intelligence platform, Dundas Dashboard, is built using Silverlight, transitioning to Expression Studio 4 Ultimate created new opportunities to provide a richer application experience. With Expression Design, Dundas is able to create icons and other graphical assets, which can either be exported to XAML or used to create high-resolution images for the Silverlight application.

“The native capability of applying gradients and transitions to virtually any visual element allowed us a huge amount of flexibility over the appearance of the entire application,” says Thauer. “It enabled us to build a visually rich application that feels more alive than a typical web application.”

Thauer further explains, “The nature of our dashboard platform—a tool for building dashboards—dictates that we must provide an intuitive, powerful design experience over the web. Silverlight’s programmatic strengths and built-in capacity for creating user-friendly objects ensures we can offer an unmatched degree of usability and responsiveness to the designers and developers who use our tools, and that they in turn can offer those same features to their end users by reusing and extending the objects we provide. This transitivity allows us to indirectly provide dashboard users with a rich, responsive, rewarding experience without having to start from scratch every time.”

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published May 2011