Expression Blend and Design : Tips and Tricks

Try to Define Visuals in XAML

xprblog — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:17:30 GMT

Ok, pop-quiz time. Below, you will find two screenshots I took from two different applications: [ Screenshot 1 ] [ Screenshot 2 ] Can you tell what is different between those two images? If you said that the button in the second image seems a few pixels...(read more)

Working with Layout when DataContexts are Involved

xprblog — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:28:50 GMT

Hi everyone, When using Expression Blend, a common task you probably engage in is working with layout. Tasks I commonly associate with “working with layout” involve moving things around, rearranging the order of elements, ensuring everything flows when...(read more)

Storyboards, Visual States and SketchFlow Animations

xprblog — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:41:56 GMT

What 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...(read more)

Silverlight Control Styling Tips Articles

xprblog — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:58:00 GMT

We’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...(read more)

Keyframe Marquee Selection, and other Timeline Tips

xprblog — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:35:10 GMT

With 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...(read more)

Hatching Effect Shader for both Siverlight and WPF

xprblog — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:06:50 GMT

Hi everyone, As you all may know, both Silverlight 3 and WPF 3.5 SP1 introduced support for effects and shaders. One of the features that I work on in Expression Blend is to make sure that you can use these custom effects easily. Beyond just writing the...(read more)

Behaviors Under the Hood – API Details and Constraining the Type

xprblog — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 01:22:25 GMT

Jeff Kelly is back with Part II of his behaviors triple-feature. This time, he focuses on more details and provides some examples of a simple behavior, trigger, and action - Kirupa Behaviors and triggers are set on objects in XAML via an attached...(read more)

An Introduction to Behaviors, Triggers, and Actions

xprblog — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:22:01 GMT

The following post is written by Jeff Kelly, one of the developers who worked extensively on both the behaviors runtime as well as the UI inside Blend that makes behaviors easier to use! In this post, he will provide an overview of the three components...(read more)

A UserControl base class for Visual State Manager

xprblog — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:02:05 GMT

As you know, Visual State Manager is a Silverlight 2 (and WPF Toolkit) platform feature that makes it easy to define a control’s visual states and to perform the transitions between states. In the case of a templated control (such as Button, CheckBox,...(read more)

Deep Zoom Composer has been Updated: Documentation and Bug Fixes!

xprblog — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:05:02 GMT

Yesterday, we released another update to Deep Zoom Composer, and you can download it from the following location: Download Deep Zoom Composer NOTE : Please uninstall any older versions of Deep Zoom Composer prior to installing this new version. This release...(read more)

Hello DeepZoomTools.DLL : Deep Zoom Image Tile Generation Made Easy

xprblog — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:17:39 GMT

In our most recent release of Deep Zoom Composer, one of the major changes we made was to change how we generated the image tiles both for designing as well as exporting your Deep Zoom Content. In the past, ever since our first release at MIX, our image...(read more)

2.5D UserControl for Silverlight 2

xprblog — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:19:06 GMT

2.5D (two-and-a-half D) is a way of using 2D objects to give a very convincing illusion of 3D. I’ve provided an implementation that has no lighting, materials, lines or polygons. But it does enable you to locate 2D (that is, flat) objects at x,y,z coordinates...(read more)

Simulating Sample Data in Blend 2 SP1

xprblog — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:06:02 GMT

Using sample data can make designing your Silverlight 2 applications more predictable. Given some data, you have a lot of flexibility in designing around this data in Expression Blend. The challenge is that there are are many cases where you simply won’t...(read more)

Cutting Shapes in Expression Blend

xprblog — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:21:11 GMT

Currently, Expression Blend does not have a scissor tool which allows you to cut shapes like you can in Expression Design. Instead, what you do have are geometric operations that allow you to not only achieve a similar result as “cutting a shape” but...(read more)

How to Animate a Drawing Line

xprblog — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:26:17 GMT

In Blend you use the Pen tool to draw lines and they appear in the XAML as <Path> elements. But after you’ve drawn your lines and you test your application, the Paths appear immediately: they don’t replay the gestures you used to create...(read more)