Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight (Foundations) [Paperback]

Victor Gaudioso (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1430219505 | ISBN-13: 978-1430219507 | Edition: 1

The only real tool for developing cross-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs) for that last 11 years has been Flash; until now! Silverlight 3 allows you to develop cross-platform rich Internet applications in a fraction of the time because of the extensive and very powerful .NET 3.5 libraries, the powerful, design friendly Blend 3 IDE, and an enhanced workflow that allows designers and developers to work on the same set of files at the same time.

• Develop stunning RIAs in a short time.
• Learn some basic object-oriented programming principles.
• Get familiar with the Blend 3 development environment.

What you’ll learn

• Learn the Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2008 IDEs.
• Learn how to create stunning animations using Silverlight 3 Storyboards.
• Learn how to incorporate video and sound into your RIAs with the Silverlight MediaElement.
• Learn about and how to develop quickly using Silverlight 3's reusable resources such as UserControls, ControlTemplates and DataTemplates.
• Learn about the new Visual State Manager and the State panel in Blend 3 to quickly and easily add MouseEnter and MouseLeave states to your UserControls.
• Put everything you have learned together to create a sample Silverlight 3 website.

Who this book is for

Web designers and developers wanting to learn Expression Blend 3 from the ground up. Those who have a background in the development of RIAs and want to learn this technology.

Table of Contents

1. Setting Up the Silverlight Development Environment
2. The Blend 3 Integrated Development Environment
3. C#, XAML, and Object-Oriented Programming
4. Controls
5. Storyboards
6. Using the VSM and Blend 3’s States Panel to Create a Silverlight Media Player
7. The Silverlight MediaElement
8. The WPF Toolkit
9. Events and EventHandlers
10. Classes and Interfaces
11. ControlTemplates, Styles, and Custom UserControls
12. Writing a Custom Content Panel
13. Building a Sketchflow Prototype
14. Putting Everything Together to Build a Sample Silverlight Website

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: 368 pages
• Publisher: friendsofED; 1 edition (June 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430219505
• ISBN-13: 978-1430219507
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,697 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

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Great for Visual Studio Code Jockeys March 3, 2010

By T. K. Reischl

Format:Paperback

The title of the book should have been: Writing Code-Behind files for Blend 3 in Visual Studio 2008.

The whole point of Blend is to be able to create Silverlight websites using a visual interface. One of the first things this author does is have the reader load up Visual Studio 2008. He even begins projects in VS. He does things in code that can be easily accomplished by just using the visual interface in Blend, he loves his coding.

Blend is part of the Expression suite of products. Yes, you can work on Blend projects in VS. For certain types of projects it is even necessary to do so, but this author takes it to the extreme. If you thumb through the book, it is page after page of code. Had I seen this before I bought it, I would never spent the money on it.

For the record, I am a coder. What I NEED to learn is how to use the visual interface in Blend, not Victor's idea of how to use code-behind in Blend.

People who want to build straight forward websites using a visual interface will be disappointed with all the coding examples used.

Getting tired of me ranting about the coding? I was tired of the coding in the book.

His book barely scratches the surface of what Blend can do on its own, without code-behind, without Visual Studio 2008.

The publisher needs to re-title the book. How about: Using C# to Code in Blend? That wouldn't sell as many books, would it?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Get using Expression Blend 3 quickly! September 14, 2009

By C. J. Kee

Format:Paperback

I found this book to be a very good introduction to learning Expression Blend 3. I am no longer intimidated by the Blend interface, which is much more than I can say about many of my peers! (I am a software engineer and have been developing with .NET since it's first beta release in 2001, but have never been very good at user design/experience.) This book has given me the confidence to build new applications without the drab, gray, boxy-look of traditional Windows applications. I loved the hands-on approach to learning that this book offers so you aren't spending all of your time reading about every property that every control has - instead, you are using them and seeing how they work in a live application. The book was easy to read and easy to follow.

I have also had some discussions with the author, Victor Gaudioso, who I found to be very responsive to my questions. He has added me to his email update list so that I get notified of new, instructional videos that he puts together for Blend 3, which I have found quite helpful.

With that being said, here are the things I would have liked to seen changed or added:

1. I did not like the fact that all of the pictures were black/gray/white. Many of the gradient effects for buttons and such were hard to distinguish when printed this way. I know that printing in color significantly increases the cost of printing, but maybe there could be a way to see the color images online so we can compare what they truly look like to what we are doing in our own design.

2. I think the MVVM example/discussion should have come at the end of the book, or maybe as an Appendix. It is a much more advanced topic than the ones leading up to it and it takes quite a bit of studying, even for a developer since I have no experience in MVP or MVVM, in order to digest it. It seemed out of place where it was.

3. I also would have liked to seen some examples using/explaining Behaviors in comparison with Event Handlers so that we could compare the 2 approaches to designing applications. If there is true separation between the designer and the developer, the designer would be more likely to use Behaviors to implement their effects than Event Handlers.

4. I also agree with another reviewer that there could have been more on using timed animations in an application using the timeline. While there was more than adequate coverage on using the Visual State Manager, there wasn't much on true animation sequences. Victor did create a couple of new videos in response to this request, which have helped.

So overall, it did fill its promise as a "foundation" book. It is one of the best "How to get started in Blend 3" books that I have seen thus far. Now I need to find a book for "the next level" in Blend. Something beyond the "foundations"...

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Kick Start to Blend/Silverlight August 6, 2009

By Joe Waldin

Format:Paperback

As an officer in the Roanoke Valley .Net Users Group, I have seen several presentations on Silverlight over the past several months. My interest in Silverlight was very strong. However, every time I sat down to experiment with Silverlight & Blend I never got past square one. Last month, I Came across Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight by Victor Gaudioso and immediately bought the book. Within minutes, I had working examples from the book up and running. This book is great for getting started and understanding the big picture. There is a considerable learning curve to understanding the Blend and Visual Studio integration. Victor's book explains this integration and so much more. If you accurately follow Victor's examples, you will learn many valuable Silverlight development fundamentals. By learning these essential concepts I am on my way to building more robust Web and WPF applications.