Silverlight™ 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Enhancing the User Interface

In This Chapter

• Understanding the Properties panel

• Drawing with shapes

• Changing dimensions of objects

• Painting with colors

• Applying transformations to objects

• Using audio and video in your pages

Silverlight applications are all about providing good user experiences on the Web, and building a good user interface plays a big part in creating that experience. A truly dynamic application, one that users find appealing, includes rich graphics, animations, audio, and video.

We look at how you use controls such as Buttons in Chapter 4 and animations in Chapter 8, but first, in this chapter, we show you how to jazz up your application by setting properties for objects such as shapes. We also show you how to transform an object by changing its dimension and position, filling it with various types of color, and doing complex things such as skewing, flipping, and projecting it into a 3-D axis. Finally, we show you how to add video and audio to your Silverlight application.

Getting to Know the Properties Panel

You set properties on user interface elements using the Properties panel in Expression Blend.

In Chapter 2, we show you how to create a simple Silverlight application called "Hello, World." If you haven't created an application yet, you can refer to that one to help you follow along in this chapter. To start familiarizing yourself with the Properties panel, make sure that you have an application open (by choosing File

Tip

If the Properties panel is not visible, ...