It contains Project tool, Help Tool, Samples tool. Now Add a Text tool T from the tool box to the artboard then properties window of the text is shown right side. In this property window you can change font type, size color etc.
Now to see how this is displayed in the browser just hit the F5 button and it looks like this on Internet Explorer. View All. What is Microsoft Expression Blend? Manoj Singh Panwar Updated date Oct 15, Few Terms related to Expression Blend Windows Presentation Foundation : It provides the features of adding multimedia tools to the applications like audio, video, user interface etc.
It is uses the markup language, Extensible Application Markup Language and thus provides ease to the developer. SIlverlight: Using some features of WPF silverlight is used to create rich interactive applications and media experiences for web.
Using certain user interface items such as the Ribbon in Office products even have strict guidelines that must be followed to comply with the end user licensing. For most there is a Vista User Experience Guideline document that provides for requirements on such things as menus, control layouts, accessibility, and more.
The logic here was that people would be more inclined to want to learn and continue to use an application if it had a familiar feel.
That logic is still partly true today. Familiarity is a strange sense. Just the other day I was helping a relative discover the joys of modern day computing. He happened to mention to me that the staff in his office use Classic settings in Windows XP. He had no idea what this meant. It was just something he heard them say once-it is their preference, or simply what they are comfortable using and feel most familiar with. As an experiment, I showed him the standard Windows XP interface and explained where things were.
Then I switched the view to Classic view. In the 21st century, the general population in most developed and technically advanced countries is becoming more tech savvy than ever before. People do not need to be coddled and can understand that moving a mouse and clicking on a button has repercussions. Vista and the software designed for it help users work smarter, faster, and more efficiently by providing a framework of smart common controls and a more visually intuitive user interface.
Together these elements ensure that all applications provide a familiarity while at the same time making the responses to choices that the end user makes much clearer. It is certainly fair to say that while technology has continued to improve and advance, the opportunity to improve user experiences in software has not kept pace until now.
Compared to the Internet, which has seen a huge rise in back-end technology as well as user interface design tools and standards in the last decade alone, application user experiences are far behind. Think of all the new languages that have come along to facilitate web applications: the more frequent use of Ajax to improve user experience and perhaps the biggest advance-the introduction of Adobe Flash and the shockwave format.
This improvement in technology is now affecting desktop applications, through user interface design. The power of the desktop application will always surpass that of the web application, primarily due to security; but, until now all of the desktop applications have been a tad boring and deployment has been nothing short of a nightmare. In the coming years ever more importance will be placed on the user experience, which is directly linked to the quality of the user interfaces that we will be building for our end users.
Well like Tom, you do not have a Minority Report. Net programming languages. Microsoft is betting the house on it, so to speak, and they usually get what they want-eventually. Regardless of what advanced features they have implemented, I can tell you that Microsoft are working a few years ahead so Expression Blend and their other products should ultimately work more efficiently with other integrating technologies that will become fulfilled with Vista, and even further ahead with Windows 7 and beyond.
If you have used Microsoft Vista, you will have noticed how Microsoft appears to have finally gotten an outstanding balance with their product with respect to familiarity, visual appearance, and general feel.
As you go deeper into Vista, you will see that some of the dialogs have much the same content and layout as they did in Windows and XP. Figure 1. There are slight differences in the user workflow in some cases, but the visual continuity is always the same throughout the operating system. Vista also brings an outstanding addition to the operating system control base, the use of Bread Crumb controls. These controls have several features that make the task of navigating more flexible and more intuitive.
You can now navigate from within any hierarchical level along your path instead of getting repetitive strain injury RSI hitting the back button way back on the first level. You can enter a path directly as you have always been able to do, complete with history. You will also get visual feedback as to the status of your navigation from the control being used as a progress bar in the background.
That is most handy when navigating large file sets or across really slow networks. The important thing to realize is that better use of both graphics and functionality has improved the application and user experience tenfold. The Vista navigation elements are shown in Figure 1. NET Framework 3. Integrating DirectX into a standard desktop application certainly has some great benefits, if not interesting results, but the development time is enormous-not to mention the performance issues designers and developers face when dealing with such a huge variation of end user machine specifications.
Increased visual performance through hardware-accelerated graphic pipelines includes more than just getting glass window borders in your applications. By shifting all this graphic processing to the GPU, a huge load is removed from the CPU which, in itself, gives rise to massive performance increases.
The difference between vector and bitmap graphics is the formats they comprise. A bitmap graphic contains thousands, sometimes millions of pixels, which represent the actual image. When scaling, the number of pixels is either decreased for reducing or increased for enlarging the image. The problems come into play when enlarging an image beyond its original size.
The computer essentially has to guess what pixels should contain what color because when an image is increased in size, the pixels do not enlarge; more are merely added to the image to fill the required space.
Vector graphics, on the other hand, are instructions on how lines, points, and curves should be drawn to form complex shapes, rather than what these shapes should look like. The advantages are that the image can be increased in size or scaled without loss of quality. The disadvantage, however, is that while vector shapes can be complex, they are no match when it comes to producing an image with high-quality photo realism, which is best suited to the bitmap.
The key to all this interactive magic is XAML the Markup script-language supported in Expression Blend and its integration with the development language base of the. Visual Studio with extensions from the product code named Cider was a preview of Visual Studio , which is now available.
XAML is the only reason designers and developers-and you as an XA-will be able to work together as a team. The XAML markup is the common component that binds all parties together, the glue, if you will. So, why use Expression Blend if Visual Studio contains a design environment? The design environment in Visual Studio is simple at best at this stage.
It contains no methods for applying animations through a timeline interface, nor does it have a control template editor. In other words, it is a limited design interface made for developers and not for animators or designers-and certainly not for an XA who needs a clear understanding of the end user workflow.
Both Visual Studio or the. Understanding UIElements visually is far easier than looking at a heap of XAML markup and trying to picture it in your head, although in time you will be able to do this as well. You, most likely, already have the majority of the core skills required. I am going to show you how to use those skills to give you a head start for getting into the new technology.
Getting your hands dirty is the only real way of understanding and perfecting your use of XAML and integrating it with the. NET languages. We will use only C in this book because it is the language used most commonly for this purpose at the time of writing. There is always a lot of conjecture about which language is best: C , VB.
NET-compliant languages. The fact is that all these languages still compile to almost identical MSIL code. Performance differences between them are negligible. Learn, at the very least, both C and VB. NET to a professional level. This will increase your value as well as increase the number of jobs you could be qualified for when time comes to move on.
You do not have to be a coding guru to get great results from WPF-but it always helps. I am going to assume that you are a beginner programmer or designer. It would be helpful if you understand some of the core functionality provided by the.
NET Framework within client application development terms. If you are a developer, note that I am not going to try to convert you into a designer which is more of a natural skill. Conversely, I am not trying to magically turn designers into developers. Instead, this chapter is intended to show you a little of how the other half lives, so to speak, so you understand and can liaise with teammates with other skill sets. The second half is more focused on developers, bringing in the concepts of the.
NET coding requirements that will greatly extend the functionality of your applications. Windows Presentation Foundation formerly code named Avalon is a collection of display technologies-or a display level subsystem-that allows developers to take advantage of the latest graphic card hardware acceleration features.
Through learning Expression Blend and a little. NET code, you will have the ability to compile your solutions into either a Silverlight or desktop deliverable. Technically, there are slight differences to some of the methods you use, but for the most part you will understand how both Silverlight and executable-based WPF applications are created. Silverlight enables your applications to be viewed in a browser-hosted environment like Internet Explorer on any operating system that has the Silverlight plug-in installed.
This gives the user the same experience they would get if they were using your application from a compiled. There is some reduced functionality in Silverlight, such as the ability to create hardware-accelerated 3D visuals for example, so care must be taken to understand the construct you are ultimately deploying to and the users you are working for. NET Framework for Vista specific technologies. It has long been a nightmare for the UI Developer to ensure that content and visual assets were being managed in terms of layout.
Before a generic entry level set of graphic cards 8Mb came along, changing screen resolutions and color settings all pointed to early retirement for a vast number of us. Things have been getting better, certainly since.
NET came along. Now WPF has once and for all sorted out such issues; never before has it been so easy to create an application that can adapt its content layout entirely based on the runtime environment. I am writing this book on a laptop with a 17" widescreen display running a resolution of ?
Even though it is one of the most powerful laptops on the market, some of the biggest companies in the world have managed to produce software that does not layout correctly on it. One of the biggest joys I have found in creating applications with Blend is that the layouts work-perfectly every time. You are now working with dynamic flow and elements layout and positioning that is based on relevance to its parent and the construct it the parent provides.
You can still specify width and height, but in most cases this will be a minimum width and a minimum height value. Microsoft unveiled the plans for Silverlight in the second quarter of Along with Silverlight comes the promise of a cut down, cross platform CLR plug-in that would make creating and distributing XAML-based applications across differing operating systems and devices simple.
At the time of writing, Microsoft has just released a preview version of Expression Blend 2. You can write the functionality for your application in your choice of. There are many more differences that will change before the final incarnation of both these technologies are ratified.
In either scenario, though, you must consider that when your application Silverlight or XBAP runs in a browser type environment, it is running in what is known as a partial trust sandbox. Partial trust has some rules that you must follow. It is essential that you be aware of your application requirements before deciding to try and deploy your application in this manner, in either format.
The rules are simple rules that govern whether an application is able to run based on the user authentication level and assigned roles or code privilege that is required by certain tasks, controls, and objects. The essence of the partial trust sandbox is that it has been developed using the same security model that is available to all. In the XBAP deployment scenario, you will find tight controls on File read and write permissions and registry actions, as well as the inability to call and execute most areas of unmanaged code.
In other words, you are still restricted to only using data from within the same executing domain. Undoubtedly, Microsoft is working very hard to change these restrictions, and you should always seek the latest information from Microsoft with regards to such restrictions.
There are exceptions for some forms of data, like video, for example. Your application will be able to display a video file hosted in another domain, but your application will not be able to access the raw data from the file that is playing. Silverlight allows you to deliver streaming video content very efficiently through the browser. Expression Media Encoder assists you in packaging your video for streaming and creating Silverlight templates that are ready to go.
BitmapEffects allow you to apply effects to resources used in WPF applications such as Shadows or Ripples, similar to the types of effects you get with graphic applications like Adobe Photoshop. There are several effects that come as standard; and you can even write your own, although this is very convoluted at present. Companies such as Atalasoft are already producing libraries that you will be able to import and use. The greatest concern, though, is the performance hit they place on Expression Blend in the design environment.
Microsoft has indicated that hardware accelerated BitmapEffects will be available for the release of. NET Framework 4. I have described what has been slated at the time of this writing. Be sure to check with Microsoft to see if any of the restrictions have been lifted, or if more have been added. Instead, look at it as a greater challenge to your initiative. By learning Expression Blend and a little. NET development you will be able to create rich Internet applications RIAs that will become a standard in future development scenarios.
Expression Blend and Visual Studio are not really in competition with each other; instead, they are being developed to work with each other. Think of Blend being the intermediary between a designer-specific application like Expression Design or Adobe Illustrator and Visual Studio. There is much rhetoric as to the potential for Blend being slowly merged into the Visual Studio environment. I would see this integration as a blow to the workflow that will exist between designers and developers if you start forcing designers to try and navigate the Visual Studio IDE.
If you implement the role of a XAML architect, there is no need for a designer to ever worry about Visual Studio, and a developer needs only to concentrate on data structures and logic. Only time will tell, but for now, using both products simultaneously is workable, although a little clunky. At the time of this writing, the XA role was an area very few people understood, even those at Microsoft.
I did find a few people that understood and had come to this conclusion themselves. Both could see a clear need for the role to be defined and promoted. Most large design agencies have, for quite some time now, implemented such a role with projects involving Flash, in which designers were not always competent in Action Scripting. There are indeed pros and cons to both environments. As it stands, I, personally, could not spend any great length of time trying to design an application experience in Visual Studio.
At the end of this book you will make your own decision on how you like it. Visual Studio does not provide for some of the functionality that Blend provides, such as an easy to use storyboarding tool to create animations and define triggers. Blend also handles data binding elegantly, which is a very important area of most applications. One of the biggest pros for Blend is that it will always give you an accurate depiction of the XAML and code to some degree live in the design-time environment, something that Visual Studio in WPF solutions continues to struggle with.
Perhaps the area that you may have heard about is XAML. Blend has a timeline-style storyboard editor, in VS you have to figure out all the keyframes by hand.
It is also easier to do vector graphics and 3D layout in Blend. Basically, any kind of advanced UI design tends to be easier in Blend, and it is easier for artists and other non-developers to use. I would personally never give an artist Visual Studio to design a UI for me mostly because everything would be broken :.
While you indeed can do everything that Blend does within Visual Studio by manually typing xaml code, Blend does have an interface that's more user-friendly for artists and animators, which makes it easier to draw vectors or create animations. The reason why you'd want to use Blend over VS depends on the job you must do.
If you are wearing your artist hat, you may find Blend easier to get the desired results. When you put your developer hat back on, you'll want VS. You must think of these as distinct tools with different sets of features, not as one being a replacement for the other. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?
Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Why should I use Microsoft Expression Blend? Asked 7 years, 7 months ago. Active 4 years, 9 months ago. Viewed 4k times. Improve this question. Zgrkpnr Zgrkpnr 1, 4 4 gold badges 15 15 silver badges 31 31 bronze badges.
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