Expression Blend 4 Beta Feature Overview available for download
Expression Blend 4 Beta is out in the wild and available for download! As a companion whitepaper, check out the Expression Blend 4 Beta Feature Overview which provides a walkthrough of the new features. Here’s where we begin:
Introduction
Expression Blend 4 Beta adds support for Silverlight 4 and Windows Presentation Foundation 4, while maintaining the ability to create and edit Silverlight 3 and WPF 3.5 with Service Pack 1(SP1) applications. Interoperability with Visual Studio 2010 has been added, maintaining the seamless workflow between the two tools.
In response to customers’ desires to do more without code, new features in SketchFlow enable more dynamic prototypes to be created and provide an enhanced player experience. Additionally, Expression Blend 4 Beta adds powerful new behaviors for all application types and makes them configurable with conditional statements.
Expression Blend 4 Beta introduces new features that support the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern for business application development. New design-time data and resource features, along with behaviors such as CallMethodAction and InvokeCommandAction greatly increase the capability and experience for design tasks while building these applications.
Along with these three areas of focus, other additions include: new controls, such as the PathListBox, new pixel shader effects, transition effects and helpful tooling improvements.
Expression Blend 4 Beta is an exciting update that continues to revolutionize the speed and efficiency with which you can take your ideas from concept to completion on the Silverlight and .NET platforms.
The rest of the paper is divided into the following topics:
- SketchFlow Improvements for Better Prototypes
- Enabling Business Application Development with MVVM
- New Controls and Effects for Dynamic Interfaces
- More Interactivity and Less Code with New Behaviors
- Editor and Tooling Improvements
- and Expression Blend Resources
I hope you find the Expression Blend 4 Beta Feature Overview useful and that you share your feedback. We want to make sure the overview for the final release is even better!
What I’ll be doing at MIX10 – sessions, events and Channel 9 Live!
Packing now, flight takes off in 8 hours and MIX10 starts tomorrow!
I’ve posted this on twitter, but I believe this is going to be the best MIX ever. Windows Phone is already huge, keynote demos are rocking and there are a ton of interesting sessions. And a lot of those are coming from external speakers, which is a great way to learn from those who do the design work and use the tools in the real world.
My schedule is packed and I thought I’d share some of the sessions and events I’m looking forward to:
Sunday
09:00 - Microsoft Silverlight 4 Boot Camp
John Papa and Mike Taulty share their immense Silverlight knowledge and teach of the Silverlight Fu.
09:00 -Design Fundamentals for Developers (and Other Non-Designers)
Robby Ingebretsen provides an encore presentation of his wildly popular session to help others learn about user-centric design, whitespace, color theory & other important concepts
13:30 – Design Tools and Techniques
Arturo Toledo and the good people from Archetype will be sharing lessons learned from doing amazing design work with Silverlight and Expression Blend.
22:00 – MIX10 Tweetup
Early birds will enjoy free drinks (until the tab runs out) and an unlimited character conversation with other MIX10 attendees. Non-attendee guests and significant others are welcome.
Monday
09:00 – Day 1 Keynote
Streamed live at http://live.visitmix.com, definitely not one you want to miss!
10:30 – MIX10 Day 1 Keynote After Party – (live stream)
Recapping the announcements and answering all your questions from the Day 1 Keynote
Who: John Papa, Adam Kinney, Loke Uei Tan and Nic Fillingham
Ask questions via @ch9live
11:30 – Syncing Audio, Video and Animations in Microsoft Silverlight Applications
Silverlight MVP Dan Wahlin discusses an animation project created for a Fortune 500 company and demonstrates tips and tricks that can be used to keep various assets synced so that audio and video clips can be started at specific times as a storyboard plays.
12:05 – Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications
Come hear Ken Azuma discuss how to design better experiences for data-centric applications from someone that has designed and developed many successful business applications using an array of UX technologies.
14:00 – Authoring for Microsoft Silverlight 4 with Microsoft Expression Blend
Christian Schormann and Peter Blois explore how Expression Blend lets you design and build rich, vibrant Silverlight 4 applications.
15:30 – Windows Phone UI and Design Language
Windows Phone constitutes a dramatic new user experience paradigm. This session will provide prescriptive guidance, tips, and techniques on how designers & developers can build beautiful, compelling user experiences that are consistent with the built-in Windows Phone 7 Series experiences
16:00 – UI Design with Expression Blend for the Windows Phone 7 Series – (live stream)
Who: Christian Schormann, John Papa, Adam Kinney
Ask questions via @ch9live
17:00 – MIX10 Day 1 Wrap Up Edition – (live stream)
Who: Adam Kinney, John Papa, Jeff Sandquist and Dan Fernandez
Ask questions via @ch9live
17:00 – Ask the Experts
MIX speakers, Microsoft team members and members of the web community will be available to answer your questions and take your feedback at this informal reception.
I’ll be by the Silverlight and Expression tables with the rest of the crew.
Tuesday
09:00 – Day 2 Keynote
Streamed live at http://live.visitmix.com
10:30 – MIX10 Day 2 Keynote After Party – (live stream)
Recapping the announcements and answering all your questions from the Day 1 Keynote
Who: Scott Hanselman, Giorgio Sardo, Adam Kinney and Nic Fillingham
Ask questions via @ch9live
11:30 – Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks and Architectural Experiences
Multi-touch capabilities in Windows 7 have a vast array of possible applications. However, the design considerations for creating desktop applications that utilize these capabilities are somewhat different than designing for multi-touch applications in public installations, such as kiosks and architectural interfaces
15:00 – The Elephant in the Room
Do you want to learn why the process of designing software always reveals our humanness – our biases and prejudices, quiet agendas, irrational actions, and diverse portfolio of imperfections – in full effect.
16:30 – Principles of Microsoft Silverlight Graphics and Animation
Come and learn how to breathe life into your designs by learning the fundamentals of Silverlight graphics and animation. We take a look at the types of graphical assets Silverlight and Microsoft Expression Blend support, where they come from, and how to leverage them in your applications.
17:00 – MIX10 Day 2 Wrap Up Edition – (live stream)
Who: Adam Kinney, John Papa, Jeff Sandquist and Dan Fernandez
Ask questions via @ch9live
21:00 – Attendee Party!
Wednesday
09:00 – Developing Multiplayer Games with Microsoft Silverlight 4
Come learn from world-renowned interactive developer Grant Skinner about the opportunities, challenges, and processes for developing successful games using Silverlight. Hear about key Silverlight animation topics from many angles including business, technical, tools, workflow and design integration.
10:30 – Flash Skills Applied to Silverlight Design and Development – (my session!)
If you know how to design and develop Flash applications, you are more than half the way there to creating Silverlight applications. Similar languages, graphic and animation features and skinnable controls, ease the training between the two technologies. Listen and learn how to add a new skill to your skillset and expand your opportunities.
11:05 – Dynamic Layout and Transitions for Microsoft Silverlight 4 with Microsoft Expression Blend
Learn to create applications that change layout and visual appearance using smooth, dynamic and visually rich transitions without writing code. Come see new features in Expression Blend that raise the bar, making it even easier to create amazing applications that will delight users.
12:00 – Prototyping Rich Microsoft Silverlight 4 Applications with Microsoft Expression SketchFlow
SketchFlow is the prototyping environment in Microsoft Expression Blend. See how to use SketchFlow to collaboratively design, evolve, explore and review user experiences and interactive content.
13:30 – Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight
So much information and so little time. Matthias Shapiro, contributing author for "Beautiful Visualization", talks about how to create information visualizations in Silverlight that bring both beauty and insight to the data. He covers different methods for portraying data, in which cases different methods should be used, and how Silverlight can inform the process and speed up a visualization project.
There’s plenty more than that going on, so check out the site: http://live.visitmix.com and keep on eye on @ch9live for live coverage.
Now, my flight takes off in 7 hours… need to pack!
.toolbox – Free online Silverlight and Expression Blend training
Woohoo, the site is live! .toolbox is a free online training program where designers and developers can learn to create Silverlight applications using Expression Studio and to apply basic UX concepts to their solutions.
I was lucky enough to get involved with the project while it was coming together and I’m very excited to see it out there in the wild. I hope you really enjoy the training content. This site will be the answer to two questions I am asked often:
- I’m a designer, how do I get started with Silverlight & Blend? .toolbox Design Scenarios
- I’m a developer, can you teach me how to design? .toolbox Design Principles
To Get Started
- Go to .toolbox and sign up using your Windows Live ID
- Visit the School section and explore the curriculum.
- Select a module, watch the videos, and follow along using the provided guide & assets.
- Take the evaluation for a completed level to achieve a badge.
- Broadcast your achievements by posting to Twitter and Facebook.
Useful Links
Favorite Tool and Library Downloads for Silverlight
I’ve created my list of favorites tools and libraries and posted them to the Downloads page on the Project Rosetta site.
After posting the updated list yesterday I realized I missed two big ones: SilverSprite and Balder.
Breaking the new list down into categories, I ended up with 3 Essential, 4 Optional and 10 Specialty downloads.
That’s 17 useful tools and frameworks for Silverlight, that are all mostly free and open source.
Thanks Silverlight community, you rock.
What are your favorite downloads for Silverlight?
Big update for the Project Rosetta site today
We just shipped a major update to the Project Rosetta site, including a new a series of Flash to Silverlight tutorials, an updated API Guide with a quick reference list and a full list of recommended tools, code samples and frameworks to download.
Getting Started Series: 
- Setting up the Tools
- The Beginning
- Storyboard Animation
- Procedural Animation
- Color Scale and Rotation
API Guide:
- Quick Reference
- Fundamentals and Tools
- Graphics and Images
- Displaying Objects
- MovieClip to UserControl
- Flex Components to Controls
And this is just the beginning – you can look forward to new tutorials in the Getting Started series, along with new series of tutorials that go deeper into a single topic.
To keep track of the latest Project Rosetta content and other similar tutorials Follow us on Twitter or get updates via our RSS Feed.
New SilverlightTV Episode: The Best Blend 3 Video Ever!
Yes its a bold statement. But we can at least claim its the Best Blend 3 Video Ever on SilverlightTV, since this is the first episode where Blend is covered.
I spend 30 minutes explaining to John just how cool Blend is by going from a prototype to a working application and highlighting the top features along the way.
Here are the links discussed in the video:
- http://projectrosetta.com/ – includes tutorials covering a lot of the exact material we went through in the video
- http://expressionblend.codeplex.com/ – the Behaviors sample pack we talked a lot about
Silverlight Design Day Registration Open for Boston
The registration links for the Silverlight Design Day event in Boston is now available.
- May 14 – Boston, MA, US
register here
"A Silverlight Design Day is opportunity to learn about Silverlight and Expression Blend from a design and interface developer perspective."
This event is taking place in the New England Research & Development Center, better known as the NERD center. I’ve never been there but it looks like a great location. More seats than normal at this event, too, so make sure to invite your friends.
For more information about the free training events check out the Silverlight Design Day information page.
Gesturecons – icons for prototyping Multi-touch applications
Gesturecons is a set of wire-framing gestural icons created by Ryan Lee, a designer for Cynergy. The icons are available for download made available via a Creative Commons License.
These icons will be very useful when creating wireframes or tutorials covering touch gestures. As a Silverlight and Windows developer, I wanted to see how well these fit with the Windows Touch API. In the image to the right, I’ve mapped the icons to the Windows Touch Gestures. (Click the image to see it larger)
Importing the Gesturecons into Expression Blend to use in an application or a SketchFlow prototype is simple since Ryan has provided the icons in an Illustrator format.
To import the icons into Blend, follow these steps:
- Create a new or open an existing project
- Select File > Import Adobe Illustrator File…
- In the dialog select the “cs.ai” file from the “Gesturecons.zip” file
- The artwork will appear in your UserControl in a Canvas named cs
- Zoom out the artboard to see all of the icons by: typing Ctrl+-, using the mouse wheel over the artboard or using the Zoom dropdown in the bottom left corner
- In the Objects Panel, Delete the borders Canvas
- Right-click the icons Canvas and select Ungroup
- Select the first Path, scroll down to the last Path and holding Shift select the last Path
- With all of the Paths selected now, scale down the group of icons by dragging one of the corners of the outermost bounding box, hold Shift to lock to a relative scale.
- Reposition the group to fit on your UserControl and zoom back out to 100%
- To reset the cs Canvas, in the Properties Panel, set Width and Height to Auto
The Gesturecons are now available in XAML as reusable vector paths. The next steps you might take to make these easier to reuse include, grouping Paths that make up an individual icon and making them available as Resources.
Thanks again to Ryan Lee for creating and sharing the Gesturecons!
Carbon Counter and EcoLight win the Silverlight Eco Contest!
The Silverlight Eco Contest winners have been announced.
The grand prize goes to Daniel James for his Carbon Counter entry, a visualization of future carbon dioxide emissions time-lapsed over the next 100 years. As the populations increase its interesting to the different countries firing C02 packets out like machine guns.
See you at MIX10 Daniel!
The first runner-up prize goes to Levente Mihály for his EcoLight entry. Its a clever app that demonstrates the difference in energy consumption between light bulbs by forcing the user to crank the light bulb machine manually.
The traditional incandescent light bulb takes a lot of cranking. No cranking needed to make the machine vibrate though, there’s a looping animation for that.
Congratulations to both winners!
Welcome
Adam Kinney is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft focusing on Expression Studio and Silverlight.
Flickr Photos
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