XAML and UI, whever it is found. Phone, Surface, Silverlight or WPF
Posted in Blend, Blend Tips on Jan 10th, 2012
I’m working on my book for O’Reilly this month (HLSL and Pixel Shaders for XAML Developers). If you’ve written books or articles yourself you know there is a lot of prep involved in getting your machine into a clean state for screenshots. You don’t want to show a list of client project names to the [...]
Posted in Blend on Jan 9th, 2012
It’s a bit hard to know the version numbers for Expression Blend releases as the information is scattered about the Internet. Version Name Number Release Date Expression Blend 4, original release 4.0 June 7, 2010 Expression Blend 4 Service Pack 1 (SP1) 4.0.20901.0 Sept 7, 2010 Windows Phone SDK 7.1 version 4.0.30816.0 Sept 28,2011 Microsoft [...]
Posted in Blend, Blend Tips, WPF on Aug 12th, 2009
Creating an ImageBrush in Blend has always been a multi-step process. Blend 3 makes a few improvements in the steps necessary for creating a ImageBrush. You can still use the traditional way if you desire. Copy an Image to Clipboard The first step in making making an ImageBrush is to copy a image to the [...]
Posted in Blend, Silverlight on Jun 30th, 2009
A common UI metaphor in recent times is the circular wait cursor or progress indicator. This article shows some easy techniques within Expression Blend 2 that simplify creating this modern UI indicator. After showing how to easily layout multiple child elements in a 360-degree pattern, I will show animation techniques for spinning, sizing and fading [...]
Posted in Blend, Code Examples, Examples, WPF on Jun 26th, 2009
Part One A common UI metaphor in recent times is the circular wait cursor or progress indicator. This article shows some easy techniques within Expression Blend 2 that simplify creating this modern UI indicator. After showing how to easily layout multiple child elements in a 360-degree pattern, I will show animation techniques for spinning, sizing [...]
Posted in Blend, Blend Tips, WPF on Apr 4th, 2009
A couple years ago I wrote a post regarding the WPF VisualBrush. As part of that post I discussed the TileBrush. TileBrush is abstract and defines a number of useful properties for creating a repeating pattern. For example you could set the source of the ImageBrush to a picture of a flower, then set properties [...]
Posted in Blend on Feb 27th, 2009
There never seems to be enough screen space when working with Expression Blend or Visual Studio. Sometimes in Blend the Artboard gets a little off center and you need to move it to see what you are working on. In this screen shot the right edge of the button and window are not visible. [...]
Posted in Blend, Visual Studio on Feb 11th, 2009
I use Expression Blend a lot when doing WPF and Silverlight projects. When I started using Expression Blend I was surprised to see that it didn’t support an add-in model. Tools like Adobe Photoshop have a plug-in model. Visual Studio has a long history of supporting the extensible model via add-ins. It seemed surprising to [...]
Posted in Blend on Feb 4th, 2008
Once you have a brush painted into a region you can use the Brush Transform tool (B) to visually alter the angle and other transform settings. Simply grab the head, tail or body of the brush transform arrow and move to see the gradient change. Rotating is easy too. Move the mouse near the head/tail [...]
Posted in Blend on Feb 2nd, 2008
For as quick way to hide all toolbars; press Tab or F4. Use the same key to show the toolbars again.
