Mar 10, 2011 Posted on Mar 10, 2011 in Hints and Tips | 0 comments

Declarative Interactivity with Actions & Triggers in Silverlight

The Expression Blend design tool aims to keep designers productive by giving them access to pre-packaged components that enable common interactive tasks to be performed without writing additional code.

In this video we’ll look at how Blend offers Actions & Triggers in order that you can drag-and-drop to invoke functionality in response to some user interface event. We’ll look at some of what’s installed with Blend but also take a brief look at writing our own Action and Trigger in order to extend the environment and we’ll provide pointers to the Expression Blend Gallery online.

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Useful Links

Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: mtaulty@microsoft.com: twitter.com/mtaulty

• An Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight 4
• http://silverlight.net/getStarted (All the tools you’ll need to jump right in).

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Feb 25, 2011 Posted on Feb 25, 2011 in Hints and Tips | 0 comments

Understanding Visual States in Silverlight

User interfaces change state. An email client might have online/offline views and might display emails in full/collapsed views. At a more granular level, a CheckBox control might have states like checked, unchecked, enabled, disabled and so on. This screencast looks at how the Silverlight UI model handles state changes.

The notion of controls transitioning between states is at the heart of the Silverlight UI model. In this video we’ll show how we can build a “popout panel” in Expression Blend by defining visual states for our user interface, the animation transitions between them and the interactive behavior that causes those transitions to take place. All of this is done via drag-and-drop in the design tool.

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Useful Links

Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: mtaulty@microsoft.com: twitter.com/mtaulty

• An Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight 4
• http://silverlight.net/getStarted (All the tools you’ll need to jump right in).
• Bing Maps – Additional libraries (not crucial for following along with this tut)

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Feb 19, 2011 Posted on Feb 19, 2011 in Hints and Tips | 0 comments

Silverlight Firestarter Keynote with Scott Guthrie

Just because you missed that awesome conference, doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! This weekend, we feature an inspiring talk by Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie as he presents Silverlight 5.

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Watch the Keynote

Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s .NET Developer Platform, unveils Silverlight 5, further advancing capabilities in the areas of premium media experiences and business applications at the Silverlight Firestarter 2010 event in Redmond, WA on Dec 2nd 2010.

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Feb 17, 2011 Posted on Feb 17, 2011 in Hints and Tips | 0 comments

Navigation Capabilities in Silverlight

Much like a regular HTML application, a Silverlight application can be structured as a set of pages with navigation links between them. This allows not only for navigation within the Silverlight content but also for applications to surface their inner content via hyperlinks in just the same way as any other web content.

This takes away the usual “black box” approach of a plug-in based app and opens up the ability for making Silverlight content open to indexing by search engines. In this video, we’ll take a look at putting together a simple navigation application and how the framework supports navigation applications.

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Useful Links

Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: mtaulty@microsoft.com: twitter.com/mtaulty

• An Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight 4
• http://silverlight.net/getStarted (All the tools you’ll need to jump right in).

View full post on Activetuts+

Jan 19, 2011 Posted on Jan 19, 2011 in Hints and Tips | 0 comments

Animation in Silverlight

Silverlight has an animation system whereby most properties on user interface elements can be animated – properties like width, height, rotation, color and so on can all be targeted in a consistent way regardless of the type of the content itself. Let’s take a look at the basics of animations using Expression Blend.

The animation system is time based rather than frame based and so properties are animated from a value A to a value B over a specified time period with the option to control how the interpolation is done between the start and the end value. In this video, we’ll take a look at the basics of animations using Expression Blend in order to put together and control Storyboards made up of individual animations.

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View Screencast

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Useful Links

Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: mtaulty@microsoft.com: twitter.com/mtaulty

• An Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight 4
• Visual Studio, Expression Blend (Getting Started)

View full post on Activetuts+