Professional Visual Basic® 2010 and .NET 4

Chapter 18. Expression Blend 3

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• Getting to know Expression Blend

• How to create a new project

• Blend's Toolbox and Assets tab

• Objects and Timeline

• Visual State Manager

• How to use Resources

• Getting started with SketchFlow

• Documenting SketchFlow

While Visual Studio 2010 has introduced several new features for editing both WPF and Silverlight applications, Microsoft has another very essential tool called Microsoft Expression Blend. With Blend, Microsoft has introduced a more designer-friendly tool that enables designers to be involved in the development process by editing the same Solution and Project files that Visual Studio creates. While Blend is primarily targeted toward designers, this is not a tool that developers should shy away from, because it will enable you to do much more than you could do in just Visual Studio.

Through the use of both Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 3, you can create rich user experiences that enable you to do more than just drop some text boxes on a form. Although everything you can do in Blend you can do in Visual Studio by just editing your XAML, Blend simply offers a much better format for editing complex concepts such as the following:

• Visual State Manager

• Styling

• Behaviors

With Blend 3, Microsoft also introduced a powerful feature called SketchFlow. With SketchFlow you can build quick and powerful mock-ups of an application's user interface with little or no code. SketchFlow provides an informal look and feel that enables ...