Expression Experiments 101 – the hunt for triggers – part 1

dsumner — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:15:46 GMT

As you well have already gathered. I am not a developer in the “live to code” sense. I have built site in the past using various technologies. I am one who always looks for quick and easy, as opposed to powerful yet complex. I just don’t have the time to learn how to be a developer in order to produce a site or create an experience I want to create.

It was with that mind set that I approached the Silverlight & Expression tool sets. You find plenty of far more comprehensive resources on the Web if you want to look at more detail, I would suggest you start by looking at the blog by Scott Guthrie that provides some excellent tutorials and this Expression site.

For me I wanted to see how quickly and easily I can simply add a piece of dynamic content to a site, with as little code written by me at all.In fact, I don’t even want to see code!

So I installed Silverlight & the Expression 2.5 June preview from here.

First off I just wanted to make something move across the screen if I clicked it.

What do I need to do I want to that? Fire up expression, then I simply followed a brief video in the training site. here on time lines objects.

All well and good but I did get a confused over something called ‘triggers’. In programming for example, when you click on something – that ability to click is the trigger, and what happens next i.e. something prints – is the event. When you use expression to create a WPF application – you get a nice long list of triggers to choose from and by clicking you can create an event. i.e,” if I click this button go and do…”. But going through the process trying to create a Silverlight 2 project, the were no triggers listed – even the function of triggers wasn’t there. Where were they?

So I took the “who wants to be a millionaire” approach and phoned a friend..

The Art of the Possible : expression

Expression Experiments 101 – the hunt for triggers – part 1