Silverlight™ 2 Bible

Chapter 4. Using Expression Blend to Design Silverlight Applications

Using Expression Blend profoundly speeds up the implementation of the design portion of your Silverlight applications. Using Expression Blend's interface, you can quickly use the mouse to create and position Silverlight controls. Then using the Properties tab, you can quickly see and send the properties to control the look and behavior of the Silverlight controls.

Expression Blend allows you to set almost every property available without accessing the XAML code. This allows the creation of Silverlight applications to be easily divided between a design team and a development team.

This is not a comprehensive chapter on using Expression Blend. Instead, this chapter focuses on familiarizing you with some of the features necessary to design Silverlight applications in Expression Blend. The idea is to give developers enough information about the design features that they can use Expression Blend to speed up development, while at the same time giving designers enough information that they can create the design elements of a Silverlight application that can be easily consumed by developers.

Note

You will need Expression Blend 2.5 or later to create and edit Silverlight applications. At the time of this writing, Expression Blend 2.5 is available only as a preview; however, it should be released shortly.

Getting Started with Expression Blend

Expression Blend is an extremely useful tool when developing Silverlight applications. ...