Monday, January 7, 2008

Expression Blend in 5 minutes or less

Using Expression Blend is pretty straight forward. It is ideal to do our Xaml in code. When you open a project and select the type you want, Whether you create your project in Blend, or some other program, your project is shown in the upper right. For the most part, we will only be concerned about ‘.xaml’ files in Blend. In the center, we have our design surface and below is our code view. When you manipulate your Xaml in the design view, Blend changes the code in the code view below.
On the very left hand side is our drawing toolbar for manipulating or creating design in Xaml. When you select an item it will open with a drop-down like menu that you select and then you can do something with it or, like the two arrows at the top, you just select it and go. If you hover over the tool a tool tip word bubble will tell you what it is. Also note for most things, the key board short cuts are the same in Blend as other popular designer environments. You also can select the ‘properties’ tab on the right hand side and you can then see exactly what you can do with Expression Blend. Blend also does a lot of cool stuff that we will talk about later.
And thats pretty much it. :) Oh you can also do animations too but that will be another post.

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