Expression Blend for WPF and Silverlight Developers

This is one of a set of notes for talks I attended as part of DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper9, held at Microsoft Reading on 29th January 2011. They are mostly for my own records, but if you find them useful, good. If you have any questions about the content (unless it’s to tell me I’m irresponsibly wrong), I’d suggest contacting either the speakers or someone who knows more about the content than I do! You can also see the twitter hashtag timeline of the day – #ddd9.

Title: Expression Blend for WPF and Silverlight Developers

Speaker: Sam Bourton
@SamBourton

Slides: tba

Notes:
Don’t “forget” about Blend – it’s better than it was, and once you get the hang of it, it’s supposed to be irreplacable. (and it’s faster than it used to be, apparently!)

Some different themes availble to jump-start you. See slides for URL.

Good idea: having a samples page which has copies of all custom style, controls etc – so you can see all the styles in one place, and change them to be consistant. Any changes you make to style reflect all controls with that style.

Creating custom icon buttons on the cheap: get icon from charmap, then paste into text block. Right click and choose “convert to path”. This renders it as a vector. Then drag over existingly-styled button, holding down Alt. Choose ‘add to content’. This should then add it onto the button.  You can see the XAML of the vector it’s created.

MVVM is ideal for Blend technology.

Within Blend, you can create sample data for data templates, so you can see how it’s going to look.

Nice thing about Silverlight is that controls use INotify: any change to the model will update the view automatically.