Customer Reviews

Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a designer who'd previously been using Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver for the past 10 years to lay out Web pages, orienting myself to the Silverlight/Blend paradigm was a challenge. Xbaps, Xaps, C#, Visual Studio and serious development are all enough to scare the frozen latte out of the average designer with my credentials. But boredom, a zest for the next cutting edge technology, and a desire to expand my portfolio of skills landed me squarely in the midst of this challenge and I'm here to tell you Mr. Gaudioso's book is the one you want if you're a designer like myself.

With exceptionally patient and generous writing, Gaudioso takes the designer into the world of serious development and stays with you throughout. He does so by introducing you step by step to this unique new application designed for the very purpose of bringing designers and developers together to create the Web applications of the future. He doesn't sugar-coat anything, Blend is a serious tool meant to be used with other serious development tools like Visual Studio. But he's able to step into the mind of the uninitiated and walk you through setting up your development environment in easy-to-understand ways.

I especially appreciated those instances in which he analogizes Web paradigms to explain WPF design constructs, comparing, for example, resource files to CSS and certain layout elements to HTML tables.

If you're a designer interested in getting your arms around WPF, Silverlight and Expression Blend, Gaudioso's book ought to be the first book you buy.

I bought this book soon after MS released the Beta 1 of Silverlight 2.
It helped me get started with learning the Expression Blend tool and how to do some basic design. It is not a programmers book nor does it attempt to be one. It is a good introduction on how to get around in Blend so you don't have to figure it out yourself. And along the way the authour makes it enjoyable.

This book was great for me. I am an old-style coder/programmer who hasn't done much actual coding for a long time. I recently ran across some stunning product simulations written using Expression Blend, so I installed a copy and tried to figure it out. I didn't have a clue! So, I looked around and found this book, bought it, and went through the examples. What a revelation! I finally understand why Microsoft wanted to "blend" the content designer and the developer worlds w/ this product. Not only that, but this book also gave me more insight into how Visual Studio can work on the SAME code set that Blend is using. Great technique for collaboration. The book is well-paced, well-written and full of useful examples. Downloads of more complex examples are available, if you want to save some time. The author did a great job adding clarity to what can be a complicated development domain.

This book is great for someone looking to get started in Expression Blend. There are a lot of tips and tricks and it really helps you navigate through the tool easily. I particularly liked that the author pointed out who the book is for and what you need to know before getting started. Also, it is a fun read and filled with real world examples! I look forward to the more advanced book that I am sure is in the works.

This book is a very good tutorial for beginners. Easy to follow step by step directions really make learning experience painless.

As the author promises at the beginning of the book, you need to know very little of C# (the brush-up chapter in the book does a good job) and nothing about WPF/Silverlight/Expression Blend to stitch up a few simple interfaces. Diligently working through the examples will give you a good grasp of the fundamental techniques. I found the book to be very helpful - the writing style is clear, the steps are illustrated well - and overall, the book makes learning Expression Blend fun. Highly recommended. I only give it 4/5 stars mainly because there were no advanced projects explored.

In a nutshell, Mr. Gaudioso's aproach is super positive and thorough. I have had almost no trouble with the examples and I feel the examples will give me good tools for a solid foundation in WPF/Silverlight design and development.

I have been avoiding Silverlight since it first was released in Beta and I couldn't get it to work or make anything in it. Frustrating. I was hoping Silverlight would go away, but it hasn't. My boss gave me the "Friends of Ed" book and I was very skeptical, for I'm a religious-nutjob fan of the O'Reilly books. Surprisingly, I found myself whizzing through the book and actually liking Blend.

I have been using Adobe products for about ten years as a designer and I have been a Flash actionscripter for over two years. I thought I would never use Blend again, but this book has gotten me excited. C# and the dot.NET framework are so powerful and snappy. Visual Studio 2008 is nothing to be shy about. I like it a lot better than using the CS4 code editor. VS2008 practically writes your code for you.

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn Blend WPF/Silverlight. You will have the tools you need to get going and confident in Blend in less than a week.

John Cardwell,
Seattle, WA

I read a lot of technical books. and in my opinion, this is a great one. The author covers large sections of Silverlight, WPF and Expression Blend 2 development through short, clearly-written, easy-to-understand, hands-on exercises. And it's fun! As a typical, graphically challenged developer, I didn't believe I had the ability to create decent looking web and WPF assets. I surprised myself at what I was able to accomplish by following the author's instructions.

Unlike so many other technical books, the quality of the editing and the proof reading is evident. If your learning style is to learn by doing, this is a great choice.

The book starts the reader off without any assumptions regarding the reader's past experience. If a person is interested in going through the book, that person will likely already have the qualifications to understand its contents. As long as the person going through the book is able to take direction coupled with the ability to be self motivated, I think that many people will find this book to be an easy read - which is saying a lot for a book which sits among others which are often dry and difficult to get through due to their nature as being technical oriented.

The progression of the book from chapter to chapter is well paced, starting easy with a bang to draw the reader in, and later becoming challenging, but not impossible to accomplish. Just as the reader passes the middle of the book, the difficulty raises ever-so slightly, but not too far where the reader is thrown off.

The very last chapters are well placed as they are essentially review over the entire contents of the book. These chapters concrete the reader's newly acquired abilities while adding a touch of more difficulty to keeps the reader moving forward because they continue to learn more even to the end.

Finally, once one has gotten through the book, I'm left with the feeling that these 15 chapters are only the tip of the iceberg, that I can either obtain further knowledge through other books, or chart out on my own. The author on several occasions lists his email address for the readers to contact him, and I've discovered that unlike other authors, he actually does respond and is interested in what the reader is accomplishing, instead of having an assistant or someone else pat the reader on the head.

The only criticism that I truly have for the contents of the book is on the level of the User Experience. Throughout the book the author steps the readers through the creation of a multitude of custom controls, buttons and the like, but never steps the reader through a complete button as most users are comfortable with seeing, where the button or control interacts when hovering or clicking upon a button. That being said, there are several occasions where the author leads the reader through areas where the reader can locate and discover how to do such a task on their own. The book reads as a very complete well rounded book, save for that one lack, and for that, I find myself feeling that the inconsistency is uncharacteristic when compared to the solidarity which the rest writing presents.

Regardless, I much enjoyed reading the book. The author's personality shined through the book from cover to cover and gave the sense that he was talking to the reader, as opposed to at the reader.

Ariel Leroux
FacingBlend.com

I am very impressed with this book on Microsoft Expression Blend 2. I would recommend it for anyone wanting to learn the program. Victor has a very nice, understandable writing style. The book is filled with easy to follow examples. But don't take my word for it; read the raving review of this book on this web site: [....]

Nice work, Victor!