Quickly Redesigning a Silverlight-based Twitter application

Adam Kinney — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:42:00 GMT

Celso Gomes: Styling a Silverlight based Twitter
application with Expression Blend 2 (10:28)

In 10 minutes, Celso Gomes redesigns a working Silverlight-based Twitter application using Expression Blend 2.

The fact that he is redesigning the working application without touching any code or breaking anything is awesome. Not only do you avoid the "throw it over the wall" model, but you can also run the application during design work, similar to hitting refresh when editing CSS.

Celso walks through some of the nicer features in Blend including:

Resources - similar to a CSS class in theory, but much more functionality available
Copy elements between projects - the beauty of persisting design elements in XAML
User Controls - encapsulating functionality into an object like a movie clip.
Custom Buttons - you can highlight a graphic element and the click "Make a Button" and you gain all of the functionality of a Button (visual states MouseOver, Click, etc.)
Richer Control templates - A ListBox is used to display the Twitter messages, and he restyles the item template once that then changes the appearance of messages.

If you like this video, you can find more Expression Training Videos on the Expression Community site.

My notes from First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2

Adam Kinney — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:14:00 GMT

I won't do this after every Scott Guthrie post, but I received thankful comments on My notes from the First Look at Silverlight 2, that I thought I would share again.

In his latest post First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2, Scott walks through the features of Blend that will help you build Silverlight 2 applications.

The basis of this article, along with the release of Beta 1 of Silverlight 2 we are shipping tool support including an Expression Blend 2.5 March preview.
Blend and VS2008 share the same solution/project file format
Very useful split view in Blend includes WYSIWYG designer and XAML source view editor. You can click on an element in the design view and it will move to the node in the source view.
Reflecting the platform update you now get more many assets to choose from. If I remember correctly in Expression 2 for Silverlight 1.0 support you had a Canvas, Rectangle, Ellipse and a Path.
As a design feature, I really like the guidelines and positioning markers in Blend.
Scott's tip on managing the Blend interface shows off its flexibility. +1 for vector UIs and WPF.
Another cool design feature, the visual way you can define the Grid properties. Allows the designer to reign in the power of the Grid.
Personal Favorite: Nice, this one was new to me. I've known how to create rounded Rectangles, but Scott shows off how to create a rounded Border which is then wrapped around a Textbox to create a rounded Textbox.
Design time preview for Silverlight 2 applications in VS2008.
Make sure to read the part about WPF style Databinding.

"INotifyPropertyChanged?"
"Yes, yes you did."
And surprise, Expression Blend understands Databinding and DataTemplates!
Redefining Control templates feels like magic. Scott even dips into the Parts Model a bit with the Button template.
Another cool designer feature, Drag and drop styles onto controls to apply them.

Yes, yes you did.

Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'expression blend'

Quickly Redesigning a Silverlight-based Twitter application

My notes from First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2