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“Expression Blend for Silverlight Developers” (DevDays, Holland)

I did a fun talk on Expression Blend at the recent DevDays conference at the Hague in Holland. The basic idea of this talk was to (as much as possible in 75 minutes) take Expression Blend from scratch through to putting something together that involved things...

Published Thu, May 5 2011 10:45 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, WPF, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 27–“Make it Flip”

This one comes from showing Blend to a few people yesterday and trying to think of various scenarios for making use of different visual states for a UI or for a control and one that came up was “can you make one of those UIs where we have a panel with...

Published Fri, Mar 18 2011 11:30 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 26–Use Libraries for Assemblies

One of the things that’s a bit annoying with Expression Blend is that when you go to reference an assembly you get the standard Windows file open dialog. That is; raises the dialog; and that’s not what you see in Visual Studio and makes hunting down the assemblies...

Published Fri, Mar 18 2011 8:46 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 25–Templating Part 3

Another important part of templating contols in Blend is the ability to go from the control parts to the control quite quickly. This works incredibly quickly for something like a Button – let’s say that I wanted an irregularly shaped button. If I just go ahead...

Published Mon, Feb 14 2011 2:35 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits, Expression

Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2

The previous post took a simple Checkbox and played with its template a little but we see quite a few more templates if we wander into a control like a ListBox. Dropping a ListBox onto the artboard and then setting up some data that it can bind to ( using the...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 5:27 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits, Expression

Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1

One of the real strengths of Expression Blend is in its deep understanding of control templates. Visual Studio doesn’t really go near control templates and so you really need Blend unless you’re a pure consumer of someone else’s templated controls. Control...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 2:47 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish

I’m amazed to find that I got so far into this series of posts around Blend without writing a post about styles. How did that happen? Let’s rectify that problem here. Styles are simple but powerful. Essentially, they’re just a bunch of property setters grouped...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 11:18 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 21–Importing from Photoshop & Illustrator…

If I had a penny for every time I heard someone from Microsoft say “I’m not a designer” when working with Blend then I’d be a rich man. Naturally, Microsoft does have some very fine designers but, unfortunately, it’s not me so I also end up having to say the...

Published Thu, Feb 3 2011 4:49 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, C#, WPF, Silverlight, VisualStudio, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 20–Group Into

A simple one but a good one nonetheless. Often you draw things on the artboard like this; and these elements are currently living in my LayoutRoot container which is a Grid but maybe I want to group these items into some other kind of container so I can just...

Published Fri, Jan 7 2011 12:30 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 19–Transformations

In Blend, transformations live down on the very appropriately named Transform section of the Propeties panel; where there’s some fairly simple stuff that you can do and some more complex stuff. This is often used a lot whilst building animations or state-transitions...

Published Tue, Nov 30 2010 11:28 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 18–Sample Data

Following on from that previous post about real data , of course we can also make sample data in Blend at the document or project level over in the data tab; All of those 3 menu options raised from the little icon with the drop down relate to creating sample...

Published Fri, Nov 26 2010 3:17 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 17–Coding in Blend

Blend seems to have been a little schizophrenic with regard to whether it wants you to write code inside the environment or not. Going from memory I think version 1 had a code editor and then 2 took it out and 3 might have put it back and beefed it up and 4...

Published Wed, Nov 24 2010 9:43 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, WPF, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 16: Real Data

In a world of Model View View Model, dependency injection and MEF you might not use this feature too frequently but Blend’s always had a feature for creating an instance of a real type for you and dropping it into your XAML. Over on the data tab there are the...

Published Tue, Nov 9 2010 11:02 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 15: The Data Store

There’s lots of data features in Blend to provide food for future posts but this post is about the data store that showed up in Blend 4. This is a fairly simple idea and I suspect that I’d use it more in the realm of a SketchFlow application than I would in...

Published Sat, Oct 23 2010 11:50 PM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

Blend Bits 14: Fluid Movement

1) In Use… On the one hand, I find the FluidMoveBehavior in Blend very simple. When an item’s layout changes I can use the behavior to have the item animate from its previous layout position to its new layout position rather than having the change be instantaneous...

Published Tue, Oct 12 2010 12:14 AM by mtaulty

Filed under: .NET, Silverlight, Blend, BlendBits

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“Expression Blend for Silverlight Developers” (DevDays, Holland)

Blend Bits 27–“Make it Flip”

Blend Bits 26–Use Libraries for Assemblies

Blend Bits 25–Templating Part 3

Blend Bits 24–Templating Part 2

Blend Bits 23–Templating Part 1

Blend Bits 22–Being Stylish

Blend Bits 21–Importing from Photoshop & Illustrator…

Blend Bits 20–Group Into

Blend Bits 19–Transformations

Blend Bits 18–Sample Data

Blend Bits 17–Coding in Blend

Blend Bits 16: Real Data

Blend Bits 15: The Data Store

Blend Bits 14: Fluid Movement