Foundation Expression Blend 4 with Silverlight [Paperback]

Victor Gaudioso (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2010 | ISBN-10: 143022973X | ISBN-13: 978-1430229735 | Edition: 1

Foundation Expression Blend 4 with Silverlight takes you through your first steps in creating rich Internet applications (RIAs) using the latest release of Microsoft’s technology. You’ll explore features such as custom user controls that you can reuse throughout your projects and the media element that allows you to easily add sound and video to your applications. Silverlight 4 enables you to rapidly develop compelling, cross-platform RIAs using the extensive .NET 4 libraries, the powerful, design friendly Blend 4 integrated development environment (IDE), and an enhanced workflow that allows designers and developers to work on the same set of files at the same time. At the end, you’ll put everything you have learned together to create a sample Silverlight 4 website.

Whether you’re an experienced .NET or web developer, or you’re just starting out, this book will provide you with all you need to create RIAs with Expression Blend 4.

• Develop stunning RIAs in a short time using Blend 4 and Silverlight 4.
• Learn basic object-oriented programming principles.
• Get familiar with the Blend 4 development environment.

What you’ll learn

• Learn the Blend 4 and Visual Studio 2010 IDEs.
• Learn how to create stunning animations using Silverlight 4 Storyboards and incorporate video and sound into your RIAs with the Silverlight MediaElement.
• Learn how to develop quickly and efficiently using Silverlight 4’s reusable resources such as UserControls, ControlTemplates and DataTemplates.
• Learn about the Visual State Manager and the State panel in Blend 4 to easily add MouseEnter and MouseLeave states to your UserControls.
• Put everything you have learned together to create a sample Silverlight 4 website.

Who this book is for

Web designers and developers wanting to learn Expression Blend 4 from the ground up. Those who have a background in the development of RIAs and want to learn this new technology.

Table of Contents

1. Setting Up the Silverlight Development Environment
2. The Blend Integrated Development Environment
3. C#, XAML, and Object-Oriented Programming
4. Layout Controls: Including the New Silverlight 4 Controls: Viewbox, RichTextBox, FlowDirection Property, and Improved Data Binding
5. Timed Storyboards: Creating a Newton Cradle Application
6. Using VSM and Blend 4’s State Panel to Create a Silverlight Media Player
7. Behaviors in Silverlight
8. The Silverlight MediaElement: Create a Video Player with a Custom UserControl, XML De-serialization, and Behaviors
9. Events and EventHandlers
10. Classes and Interfaces
11. Styles, Control Templates, and Custom UserControls
12. Writing a Custom Content Panel
13. Writing a Silverlight 4 Out-Of-Browser Application with Elevated Trust and the New Silverlight 4 COM API
14. Creating a Photobooth Application with the Silverlight 4 Webcam API
15. MVVM: Model-View-ViewModel
16. SketchFlow Prototyping
17. New Features of Silverlight 4

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Victor Gaudioso is a senior application engineer at IdentityMine, a top-tier software company specializing in designing and developing cutting edge software applications, creating customized WPF/Blend and Silverlight training programs and creating tools for designers and developers. Victor has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Harrah's, Mattel, NBC/Universal, Disney, Best Buy, GameStop, Vivendi Universal Games, and New Line Cinema, among others. Victor, a former Flash/ActionScript engineer, still stays active in the Flash community by writing articles and tutorials on ActionScript.org, where he is also a moderator.

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: friendsofED; 1 edition (September 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143022973X
• ISBN-13: 978-1430229735
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #629,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Victor Gaudioso is an independent Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight developer. Victor has worked on some of the most cutting-edge WPF and Silverlight applications that have been developed to date, including the Surface Winebar CES demo and Surface Air Hockey with simulated physics, which debuted at PDC in 2008. Victor was also part of the team that launched the Silverlight Entertainment Tonight Emmy minisite, one of the very first Silverlight applications to market, which made live streaming video directly from the red carpet available to the site's visitors. In his spare time, Victor continues to write books under the friends of ED flagship Foundation series in hopes of presenting the powerful new Microsoft technologies of WPF and Silverlight to developers around the globe. It would appear that he is succeeding, as his first book is required reading in most courses on interactive web media development, and is available in university libraries around the world--from Germany to the Philippines to the United States. Along with development and writing books, Victor reaches out to the community, for which he teaches a course on WPF and Silverlight at Almer/Blank's Rich Media Institute in Venice, CA. Victor is also active in the Flash community and often makes appearances at Flash events such as Flash in the Can (FiTC) and Flashapalooza.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Tutorial for Expression Blend September 17, 2010

By M. Clark

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I got this book because I found Expression Blend to be virtually impossible to figure out on my own. I'm a coder not a designer, so I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I think I could figure out what about 25% of the various tools were supposed to do. I needed a book to start with (the online tutorials from Microsoft were nice but too hard to follow) and I needed a book whose author started out assuming that the reader was a complete newby. When I saw that the author of this book had done two previous versions of the book for two previous versions of Blend I was hopeful that this would do the trick. The word "Foundation" in the title suggested strongly that here was a book that very basic. And the upshot of it all was, YES! The book assumes you know very little about the subject and takes you on a hand-held guided tour of the product. Victor Gaudioso makes sure you have an opportunity to work with pretty much every important tool in Blend.

About 50 or 60 pages into it, I got confused about something very important, and wasn't sure what to do about it. I thought I recalled seeing the author's email address in the introductory material, so I checked and yes there it was. I sent an email complaining about what I thought was a problem with the book, or maybe my Blend installation. Assuming that here must be a "famous author" with no time for the common man, I wasn't sure what to expect, but dang if he didn't respond within an hour or so and offer to help me out! He even offered to give me a call to help clear up any misunderstandings I might have. Well, I took him up on it and we had a very pleasant chat about Silverlight, Blend, and so on. I wasn't the only one impressed by this eagerness to assist a reader: when I told my coworkers about it they were amazed, too. And my problem was not the book, or Blend, but me of course.

I recommend this book highly to anyone who needs to learn how to build Silverlight applications in Expression Blend -- especially you design-challenged developers out there!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Hands on Labs September 7, 2010

By Sam Gill

Format:Paperback

I have just finished going through this book and working through all the exercises and samples and in my opinion it is the best book to learn all about using Expression Blend 4 to create powerful Silverlight 4 applications. The author also demonstrates how designers can use Expression Blend 4 while developers can use Visual Studio 2010 without stepping on each others toes. Whenever I encountered a problem I e-mailed the author Victor Gaudioso at [e-mail] and he was extremely helpful.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a quick start on some exciting technologies.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent October 4, 2010

By P. H. Mason

Format:Paperback

This has to be one of my favourite Silverlight books. I've bought all three editions of this book and the latest is even better. The best part of this book is the focus. Most of the material is Blend specific and there is just enough attention paid to peripheral topics (such as MVVM, OOP, installation) for it to make sense, but not distract the experienced .NET developer. The samples are also nicely balanced - not too simple, but not too complex.

It's nice to see a well written and well thought out book on a topic that, unfortunately, doesn't have much print coverage.

Just one warning though. This is an introductory book (even the title says so) that will get you well on your way, but Expression Blend (and Silverlight) is complex and the only way to master it is to experiment, a lot.