Most .NET developers spend the majority of their working day within the confines of Microsoft Visual Studio. This full-featured IDE is full of essential developer tools that make light work of common development tasks. Visual Studio also provides UI design tools for all of the .NET UI technologies (Windows Forms, ASP.NET, HTML, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone). The XAML designer in Visual Studio has seen plenty of enhancements in the last few years but Microsoft provides a much more powerful and appropriate editing tool in Expression Blend 4. If you are a XAML developer, you need to master Expression Blend in addition to Visual Studio. The value provided by the Blend toolset is too great to ignore.
This course approaches Expression Blend from a developer perspective and teaches you when to use Blend features and when to stay in Visual Studio. During the week, you will learn what Blend tools are superior to the Visual Studio equivalents and more importantly what unique tools are available only in Blend. It's all about being productive and understanding when it is cost effective to switch over to Blend for a task.
When it comes to unique tools in Blend, you cannot ignore SketchFlow. SketchFlow is a modern prototyping tool that enables teams to make rapid and realistic user interfaces. These prototypes contain wireframes of individual screens and provide a visual map of UI navigation flow between application screens.
The freely distributable SketchFlow player ensures that your prototypes can be demonstrated effectively to your client. Clients can test multiple scenarios and provide comments for the development team by annotating their experience as they navigate the proposed prototype. Stakeholder feedback can be imported in Expression Blend and overlaid upon prototype screens providing valuable feedback for your design team.
Here is a sample of the some of the Expression Blend tools and features covered in this course.
- Animations and Timelines
- Gradient Editing
- Control Templates
- Template PARTS
- Visual State Manager
- Resources and Resource Dictionaries
- Styles
- Sample Data
- DataBinding
- Shape Combining
- Paths, Layout Paths
Microsoft spent years promoting Expression Blend as a designer tool, which is a shame as it is just as important for UI developers to know how to use this powerful tool. In this course, you'll learn the strengths of Blend when compared to Visual Studio and discover which tools are indispensable for constructing your XAML UI.
Isn't it time you learned how to be more productive with Expression Blend?