Beginning Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Windows® Phone Applications Using Silverlight® and XNA®

SUMMARY

In this chapter, you've looked at how to use Blend to create the Silverlight XAML for which you'd normally use Visual Studio. This chapter concentrates on the areas in which Blend is a much better tool for the job.

First, you looked at creating a simple form with text boxes and buttons. Then you looked at how to change the visual aspects of them with colors, borders, gradients, and images.

Next, you looked at how to reuse system resources such as colors and how doing so can help your application fit the current theme of the user's phone. You also re-templated a Button control and learned that re-templating gives you power over how a control looks.

You looked at how to create a storyboard, which is an animation that can be used in any arbitrary context. Many of the built-in controls in WP7 utilize some kind of animation, and you looked at how to leverage visual states to control transitions between different states of a control (for example, when a button is clicked).

Finally, you looked at the data binding capabilities of Blend. You learned that Blend can provide a true WYSIWYG experience when you leverage its sample data features.

EXERCISES

1. If all of Blend's panels were hidden, and you wanted to change the theme color of the phone in the artboard, how would you do it?
2. Name three different controls and three different properties that can be used to change the way an existing form looks.
3. Why should you try to use system resources such as Styles and Colors instead of making ...