Professional Silverlight® 4

Chapter 3. Building Applications with Expression Blend 4

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding the key Expression Blend IDE elements

• Creating a project in Silverlight using Expression Blend

• Creating and using Behaviors in Expression Blend

• Visual states, the Visual State Manager, and custom control templates in Expression Blend

• Importing and working with Design Elements not created in Expression Blend

• Understanding other elements of the Expression Suite as they relate to Expression Blend

This chapter gets you (the Silverlight Developer) up-and-working with Expression Blend; it helps you understand what Expression Blend does and doesn't do and how it works in conjunction with Visual Studio.

If you have done any Silverlight work lately, you most likely have heard of Expression Blend. Expression Blend is the premier WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool for working with XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language)–based design elements in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight. Designed specifically for designers or those developers that tend to work more in the UI rather than the backend, Expression Blend has been built out so well as to be a crucial tool for all developers, and in some cases, when used with SketchFlow, it can also be a valuable tool for other types of workers such as information architects (IAs) and project managers. Part of what makes Expression Blend crucial in your development process is that both Visual Studio and Expression Blend can work against ...