Just found out from the Expression Blend and Design blog that the Nibbles Tutorial website, famous for providing small tidbit tutorials on Expression Studio, Silverlight 3 and WPF, has been updated to show how the cool samples included with Expression Blend 3 are deconstructed. Check out the updated site now!
I love it when new versions of software are released, it gets better whenthe installation experience is a breeze. I must say, the installation experience for this version of Expression Studio is much improved from previous versions, and it takes just a few steps!
It’s quick, no worries there.
I clicked “Accept” without blinking.
Definitely “Yes” if it helps in improving this piece of software.
Hit install and we’re ready to go!
Which I believe easily one of the most impressive and innovative enhancement to Expression Blend!
Why do I say so? Read on.
One of the key element that makes Expression Blend such a powerful tool, is its capability to allow designers to customize and have complete control over the visual look and feel of every element in WPF and Silverlight applications, which would turn out exactly the same as it looks in Blend, thanks to XAML.
So, when customizing the look, feel, transition animations, etc of a control, the steps are pretty different for both WPF and Silverlight, briefly shown below:
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Thus, in order to “style” each control, the designer would have to define the transition animations that are stored in a Storyboard, and the look and feel of various states, and for Silverlight applications, they also need to write code to trigger the transition animations.
With the introduction of the Visual State Manager (VSM), that will be included in the June preview of Expression Blend, these steps could be further simplified, but not replaced. As VSM is introduced to simplify the customization of visual states of controls.
Visual States are essentially the various states of a control that could be seen visually. For example, a checkbox could have a few visual states:
| Unchecked | –> |  |
| Checked | –> |  |
| MouseOver | –> |  |
| MouseLeftButtonDown (or MouseDown) |
–> |  |
With VSM, you could easily customize the various visual state of a control, along with the animations that will be in effect upon each state transition, and the very duration of each transition animation.
The Interaction Panel of Expression Blend will now include a State Explorer, allowing designers to now dive down, view, and customize the various visual states of any control. The duration of transitions can be defined for each visual state group, or for a specific visual state, or even for transitions to other visual states.
VSM is not only supported for template-based controls, but also User Controls, where states could be defined, instead of customized based on the available states.
Do take note that the VSM will be available for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Application Projects for the June preview of Expression Blend, but the preview version for WPF will be available as a separate download.
To find out more about the VSM, check out the awesome posts by Christian Schormann of the Expression Team:
- Creating Control Skins with Visual State Manager – An Introduction (Make sure you see the video!)
- Visual State Manager: Goals
- Visual State Manager for User Controls: A Simple Chord Finder Example
The introduction of VSM greatly simplifies the process of “styling” both WPF and Silverlight applications, by providing a consistent solution of managing “styles” of controls.
I for one love the idea of not needing to write any code in order to “style” the applications I craft, and most definitely reduce the learning curve of designers going from WPF to Silverlight and vice versa.
Kudos to the Expression Team in bringing such a huge improvement to Expression Blend!
Just got news from my MSP manager that Remix Essentials 08 will be held at:
Date : 27th May 2008 Time : 9.00am – 1.00pm Venue : Lim Kok Wing University, Cyberjaya
I’ve been hearing “rumours” that Remix 08 will be held at soon, and I was really looking forward to it.
There will be sessions on stuff like Expression Studio, Windows Live, Silverlight, WPF, and UX. The speakers of these sessions are awesome guys like Leon Brown, Arturo Toledo, Angus Logan, and our resident Silverlight guy, Rohan Thomas.
Unlike the Remix or Mix events of other countries, Remix Essentials 08 is totally free!
On top of that, attendees stand a chance to win a full copy of Expression Studio 2! The seats are limited to a first come first served basis, you’ll definitely not want to miss out, so register right now!
Sweet, Silverlight 1.0 RC1 has been released, as mentioned from Tim Sneath’s post in his blog. He also mentioned in his post that Silverlight 1.0 RC1, which code-behind is done using Javascript, is now much more feature complete and stable (2000+ bugs fixed!), where Silverlight 1.1 is released as an Alpha Refresh, so download them now and install them!
For those who are interested in developing on Silverlight, Tim Sneath also included links for some of the tools, which are:
The newest Visual Studio, VS 2008, codenamed “Orcas”, comes with load of features, like multi-targeting support (backward compatibility), WPF & Silverlight editor, Javascript Intellisense, better CSS support, LINQ enabled, and many others.
For more information, refer to Scott Guthrie’s post on VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 Released. For information on its support on ASP.NET AJAX, refer to his post on ASP.NET AJAX in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008.
There are also many other cool stuff about VS2008 you could check out Scott Guthries post here to find out more, I didn’t post them because I really didn’t want to spoil the fun, but hey, its seriously cool, so make sure you check it out.
Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight
Its an add-on to Visual Studio 2008 to support for the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh, make sure you download it along with Visual Studio 2008.
Silverlight 1.0 SDK / Silverlight 1.1 SDK
I’m not sure but the SDK may include steps to help developers upgrade their “broken” Silverlight applications (due to them not supporting the RC1 Release), judging from what I got to know from this post.
Includes controls that could be bundled together with the ASP.NET default controls in the futures, like the Media control, built with Silverlight, (I saw it demo’ed in this Mix’07 session - DEV05 – Developing ASP.NET AJAX Controls with Silverlight, check out the sessions here), new ASP.NET AJAX features, for more information go here.
Expression Blend August Preview
Make sure you download the Expression Blend 2 August Preview, though the only key add-in I noticed is its support for Visual Studio 2008 (I’m praying “Edit in Visual Studio” goes through the UAC, though I doubt it), but I think they’ve definitely included much more support for Silverlight.
Expression Media Encoder Template Updater
An update for Expression Media Encoder Preview, make sure you have Expression Media Encoder installed, else you could get it here.
Microsoft Expression Blend 2 August Preview could be downloaded here, for more information, you could also refer to the Blend section in the Microsoft Expression website.
Microsoft Silverlight (It has one of the coolest names ever!), for those who do not know what it is… (You’re officially outdated!!!! Though you know now thanks to me J)
“Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows. “
(Taken from Silverlight.net)
As for those of you that are confused (bet you aren’t), think of Silverlight as…
(flash) an animation technology for the web, which is currently still under development, but is currently being applied by many major companies, like BBC, Netflix, Fox Movies, and many more! The great thing is, .NET developers can now use their .NET development skills to actually create awesome-user-experience-based-applications, for the Web, using tools developers are more than familiar with: Visual Studio 2005 for coding, and a new tool, Expression Blend, could be used to create all the animations and stuff.
There are currently two versions of the Silverlight, Silverlight Alpha 1.1 (supports .NET managed code like C# and VB.NET), and Silverlight Beta 1.0 (supports only Javascript), but later on both will be combined into a single plug-in, so do test out them! You can download them here.
As for learning Silverlight, there are many cool sites to learn it from, but the one that catches my eye the most is Nibbles, a site created fully using Silverlight, and the thing is, ITS SOOOO NICE!!!!!!!
“Celso Gomes is an amazing interactive designer working at Microsoft who is responsible for the beautiful sample applications that ship with Expression Blend and did some of the earliest design explorations for Silverlight. Now he’s come up with Nibbles: a series of “snack tutorials for hungry designers” that cover the use of Expression Blend to build WPF and Silverlight content. The site itself is a stunning example of Silverlight, with faded animations and transitions and accordion bars: it makes my own work seem feeble by comparison. Make sure you check it out – it’s inspiring…”
(Taken from Tim Sneath’s Blog)
Well, since I’m doing a seminar on Silverlight, I’ll be posting the info I found here, so stay tuned!
I believe most of you have already heard about it, Microsoft have not long ago just shipped a new set of tools for designers, which are all included in one awesome suite, the Microsoft Expression Studio, I’ll be posting a writeup on each of the tools within the Expression suite. There are four tools in Expression Studio, here I’m going to summarize their usage, and my thoughts on each one of them, starting with Expression Web.
Tool for creating websites, think of it as a much more advanced Microsoft FrontPage, and with its release, Microsoft are now stopping the Microsoft FrontPage product line, and all future releases for designing on the web will be part of the Expression suite. It’s basically the same as FrontPage, something like a WYSIWYG editor for the web, but unlike FrontPage, Expression Web comes with pretty extensive support for ASP.NET based website, and we’re talking about ASP.NET 2.0 here, allowing users to be more efficient to create rich, interactive and dynamic websites.
Thoughts Read the rest of this entry »
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