The team blog of the Expression Blend and Design products.http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/atom.xmlCommunity Server2009-07-15T16:14:28Zhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/10/13/storyboards-visual-states-and-sketchflow-animations.aspx2009-10-13T17:41:56Z2009-10-13T17:41:56ZWhat are these things – are they different ways of doing the same task? When would I use one in preference to another? Do they all work in all project types? This post will try to answer those questions by describing the animation and control customization tools that are available to you in Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow, and discussing what jobs each tool is meant to do. I’ll be classifying project types along two independent axes: WPF or Silverlight, and Blend or SketchFlow. In the first release...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/10/13/storyboards-visual-states-and-sketchflow-animations.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9906737" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/10/02/visual-state-manager-tips-for-design-and-authoring.aspx2009-10-03T05:34:00Z2009-10-03T05:34:00ZAs you probably know, Silverlight and WPF have a runtime piece called the Visual State Manager (or VSM for short). As I’ll describe in this post, VSM and the Expression Blend tooling support for VSM lend a nice clean mental model to the business of visual states and visual state changes for both custom controls and UserControls. Although chronologically the story begins with the control author, I’ll talk about that aspect later in this post simply because there are more people in the world concerned...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/10/02/visual-state-manager-tips-for-design-and-authoring.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9902667" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/09/15/expression-blend-3-survey-win-a-free-zune-hd.aspx2009-09-16T02:34:41Z2009-09-16T02:34:41ZHello! The Expression Blend team is currently planning features for future versions of Expression Blend. We encourage everyone to take our Blend 3 Survey and send us your feedback. All eligible participants will be able to enter a drawing to win a FREE Zune HD ! &#160; As the winner you will be able to customize your own 32GB Zune HD (color and pattern). The deadline for submitting a survey response is October 5th, 2009 @ 11:59pm. The winner will be announced on October 9th, 2009. Click here to complete...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/09/15/expression-blend-3-survey-win-a-free-zune-hd.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9895612" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/09/09/silverlight-control-styling-tips-articles.aspx2009-09-10T02:58:00Z2009-09-10T02:58:00ZWe’ve published eleven new articles on the blog and they all contain information and tips that you’ll find useful when styling common Silverlight 3 controls. First there’s an article with some general tips: it discusses template binding, different ways of binding Content in your template, some of the smarts in the Make Into Control command, and some tips on visual states. Then there are ten articles focusing on specific commonly-used controls. For each of these specific articles the article format...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/09/09/silverlight-control-styling-tips-articles.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9893397" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/09/02/keyframe-marquee-selection-and-other-timeline-tips.aspx2009-09-02T23:35:10Z2009-09-02T23:35:10ZWith Blend 3 it’s now possible to draw a marquee (or lasso) around keyframes to select all the keyframes that fall within it. Hold down the CTRL key then drag out a marquee with the mouse pointer as shown below. You can even begin your drag operation when the mouse pointer is over a keyframe or an animation bar; so long as CTRL is pressed, this will not result in selecting and/or moving any keyframe or animation. If you ever used the time ruler area above the Timeline to move the yellow playhead...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/09/02/keyframe-marquee-selection-and-other-timeline-tips.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9890563" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/08/26/using-custom-value-editors-for-behaviors.aspx2009-08-27T01:05:45Z2009-08-27T01:05:45ZOk, Jeff Kelly is back with Part IV of his coverage on behaviors-related topics. This one talks about some of the built-in value editors we provide to make it easier for your users to use behaviors that you create - Kirupa In Expression Blend 3, we’ve provided a number of custom ValueEditors in the property inspector to enhance the usability of our standard Behavior set. As an added bonus, we’ve introduced some limited extensibility to allow third-party controls and behaviors to reuse a few of these....(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/08/26/using-custom-value-editors-for-behaviors.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9885990" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/08/24/blend-3-samples-deconstructed.aspx2009-08-24T22:16:47Z2009-08-24T22:16:47ZIn my previous post, I mentioned that most of the samples from previous versions of Expression Blend have been uploaded to our gallery. One thing that is common with all of the samples is that Celso Gomes had a hand in making them. Recently, Celso started deconstructing how many of the samples work at his site: http://www.nibblestutorials.net : Go check out Celso’s site if you are interested in learning more about how these samples work. Cheers! Kirupa :)...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/08/24/blend-3-samples-deconstructed.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9882895" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/08/18/all-expression-blend-samples-posted-to-the-expression-gallery.aspx2009-08-19T02:03:19Z2009-08-19T02:03:19ZHi everyone, As many of you probably already know, the Expression Community site is where you go to learn more about how to use Expression Blend. One of the big components of the Community site is the Expression Gallery where you can download and share all kinds of content with the rest of the world. I had some time recently, so I’ve uploaded many of the samples that have shipped with Expression Blend to our gallery: &#160; Just head over here and download them all. I’m not fully done uploading all...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/08/18/all-expression-blend-samples-posted-to-the-expression-gallery.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9874710" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/30/deep-zoom-composer-updated-to-fix-export-bug.aspx2009-07-31T01:29:11Z2009-07-31T01:29:11ZHi everyone, We have released an update to last week’s Deep Zoom Composer release to address a fairly serious bug related to the image paths we generate during export. You can download the latest version from the following location: Download Deep Zoom Composer As always, please uninstall all existing versions of Deep Zoom Composer before installing the new version. The export related bug we fixed has to do with image tiles not loading when you export using our custom templates. If you exported using...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/30/deep-zoom-composer-updated-to-fix-export-bug.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9853823" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/26/the-states-pane-and-wpf-controls.aspx2009-07-26T22:51:05Z2009-07-26T22:51:05ZLast October I described how to use the States pane in a WPF project with Blend 2 Service Pack 1 . Things are even simpler with Expression Blend 3 so in this post I’ll remind you how to use the States pane with WPF controls. As you may know, when you create a template for a Silverlight control, the States pane populates with States ready for you to select-and-design. This is because Silverlight controls are designed to work with States, and each Silverlight control advertises the States it works...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/26/the-states-pane-and-wpf-controls.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9849375" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/23/expression-blend-3-secrets-of-working-with-data.aspx2009-07-24T01:48:31Z2009-07-24T01:48:31ZEvgeny is back with a great blog post describing some cool features related to the new Sample Data feature we introduced in Expression Blend 3. Visit his blog post to go read it: http://etvorun.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6054141F335D00D3!130.entry Cheers! Kirupa :)...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/23/expression-blend-3-secrets-of-working-with-data.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9846865" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/23/caching-and-deep-zoom-composer-downloads.aspx2009-07-24T00:54:53Z2009-07-24T00:54:53ZHi everyone, Some of you have let us know that the version of Deep Zoom Composer you downloaded yesterday is actually the version from a few weeks ago. The reason for this has to do with the delays in propagating the downloads across the various servers, and sometimes it does take a bit longer than expected to keep everything in sync. Complicating this problem is our decision to not create a new page for our Deep Zoom Composer download pages. This means that some of you may see a cached version of...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/23/caching-and-deep-zoom-composer-downloads.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9846830" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/22/deep-zoom-composer-released.aspx2009-07-23T07:12:41Z2009-07-23T07:12:41ZHi everyone, To coincide with the official launch of Expression Studio 3 , we have released the first final version of Deep Zoom Composer as well. You can download it from the below location: Download Deep Zoom Composer As always, please uninstall all existing versions of Deep Zoom Composer before installing the new version. What’s New This release pulls together a lot of the ideas that we had been previewing to you in bits and pieces for the past releases – some for over a year! The following sections...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/22/deep-zoom-composer-released.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9845687" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/22/expression-studio-3-launched-today.aspx2009-07-22T21:35:06Z2009-07-22T21:35:06ZToday we announced the official launch of Expression® Studio 3 , a suite of professional design tools for creating Rich Internet Applications. This announcement comes shortly after the July 10th Silverlight 3 launch and the availability of the release candidate for Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow. It is super exciting for us on the Expression Web , Expression Design , Expression Blend + SketchFlow , and Expression Encoder teams to showcase the final versions for the 3rd release of the Studio. Below...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/22/expression-studio-3-launched-today.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9845117" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/15/a-look-at-some-advanced-behaviors-features.aspx2009-07-16T02:14:28Z2009-07-16T02:14:28ZJeff Kelly is back with Part III of his behaviors coverage. This time, he focuses on the more advanced uses of Behaviors&#160; - Kirupa In previous posts, I’ve touched on the basic pieces of the Behaviors API and some basic usages of them. In this post, I want to wrap up the discussion of the basic Behaviors API with some discussion of some of the more advanced features exposed by the Behaviors API. Advanced Behaviors A large amount of interactive scenarios can be described in the language of triggers...(<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/07/15/a-look-at-some-advanced-behaviors-features.aspx">read more</a>)<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=9834787" width="1" height="1">xprbloghttp://blogs.msdn.com/members/xprblog.aspx