Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight (Foundation)

Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight (Foundation) | Victor Gaudioso | Exactly what I needed...

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Foundation Express...

	Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight (Foundation) Victor Gaudioso friends of ED, 2008 - 350 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In this book, you'll: Learn the Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008 development environments Create designs using Blend 2's unique tools Use XAML and C# to add interactivity to your designs Publish your Rich Media Applications to the Web using Silverlight The only real tool available for creating Rich Media Applications, web-based animations, and games has been Flash? until now! WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight have opened the door of Rich Media Application development to Microsoft .NET developers. With Microsoft's new Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008, you can now create compelling Rich Media Applications complete with animations and even 3D! This book shows you how to take full advantage of Blend's new interface, together with and Silverlight's vastly improved designer-developer workflow, guiding you through every step of development from downloading and installing of the development environment through creating finished, functional projects. You'll learn how to create simple drawing applications with the InkCanvas, make tabbed and scrollable interfaces, as well as build fully featured media players, photo galleries, and interactive 3D designs. Each chapter discusses major WPF and Silverlight features, provides a hands-on tutorial, and explains how that feature is implemented in the real world. In the end, you will have a collection of impressive WPF and Silverlight applications that can be added to your portfolio. 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 Rich Media Applications with Expression Blend 2.

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That's what I needed.

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

Exactly what I needed...

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.

The best book for designers by far

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.

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Very Good Introduction to Blend 2

Silverlight and Blend new product releases are moving so fast that it is very difficult to find books that are up to date; however, one of the things I especially like about this book is the awesome and rapid support that Victor provides for the readers. Victor has updated samples rapidly, added new examples, fixed examples that were broken with the new releases of Silverlight 2 and Blend 2.5 preview (now Blend 2 sp1) very quickly.

Victor has provided new examples and Word docs for the Blend 2.5 (now Blend sp1) update which includes the new Visual State Manager, MediaElement, and custom button creation.

David Roh

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Good, but not enough

The author of this book starts great, explaining a lot of features of Blend 2, but not deep enough. I was sincerely expecting a lot more. Many features of Blend are not explained and great features as timelines, triggers and resources have less pages that I wanted to read.
The author explains very well, so I can say that the book is very good for a begginner, but not for experts.

reviews: page 1, 2

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