Essential Expression Blend Training

Essential Expression Blend provides practical and hands-on experience with the preferred designer tool for the Silverlight, WPF and Windows 7 Phone platforms. If you are targeting any of these systems then you need to understand how to use this tool effectively to design, prototype and build engaging, manageable and compelling user interfaces.

You'll get answers to these questions:

• How do you divide the design and development between developers and/or designers?
• What are the guidelines for UX design for the different target platforms?
• How do you reuse and import assets from other designer tools?
• How can you use Sketchflow to prototype your applications and get feedback before building the product?
• How can the designer/integrator provide design-time experience for data elements?
• How do you apply design patterns such as Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) in Blend?

• Learn how to use Blend and share the project format with Visual Studio
• Manage Styles, resources and special effects inside Blend
• Use the Visual State Manager to apply animations, transitions and effects to controls
• Customize the look and feel of controls by creating Control Templates
• Use Blend Behaviors and Triggers to apply runtime behavior

This course covers Microsoft Expression Blend and is intended for designers, integrators or developers who are targeting applications using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, or Windows Phone 7.

Day 1

Introducing Expression Blend

In this module, we will look at the Expression Blend tool overall - creating projects, adding objects to the designer surface, moving objects, examining the generated output, etc. You will see how to import assets from other tools such as Adobe Illustrator, how to draw out your UI design and in layers and how to generate content that is maintainable.

Prototyping with Sketchflow

Sketchflow is an optional component of Blend that allows designers to quickly mock up the UI and pass it around the team for review and comments. This session will introduce you to this project type and show you how to use it most effectively to design each of the input screens and then navigate between them to show the overall application flow. Then we will examine how to deploy the prototype and the collect the feedback from the reviewers, which will then be into the actual application design. We will also discuss the merits of re-targeting the prototype content into the actual product.

Adding Designer Runtime behavior

Blend formalizes the attached behavior pattern by introducing the System.Windows.Interactivity namespace and behavior/action support in the Blend UI. This feature allows designers to incorporate runtime behaviors into the application very easily using the tool without writing any code behind. In this module we will look at the supplied behaviors, how they are triggered and what you can do with them.

Day 2

Working with assets

One of the jobs of the UX designer is to make a pleasing and consistent UI. This session will show you how to incorporate visual assets such as images, fonts, video, and audio files. We will also explore how to share various assets such as colors and fonts across the entire application structure.

Dealing with Data

This core session will show off the powerful data binding capabilities of the XAML based technologies (WPF, Silverlight and WP7) using the Blend tool. You will see how to mock up data sources, create design-time data so you can properly create the UI with sample data, and how to create Data Templates to provide visual instructions for non-visual data. Finally, we will look at important design patterns for segregating visual appearance from program behavior such as the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern.

Graphics and Special Effects

This module will show off the graphical features of the tool - drawing curves, layout along arbitrary paths, built-in shapes, complex brush patterns, using images and video and finally how to use special effects such as opacity, pixel shaders and transforms in the UI.

Day 3

Working with Animations

In this session, we will look at providing runtime animations for progress reporting, activity, or trivial effects. You will see how to create, start and stop Storyboards, how to apply transitions and layout effects, use easing operations to change the timing of the animation, and how to use drive the animations using defined states.

Custom Controls and Control Templates

This final module covers building reusable UI controls and changing the visual appearance of existing controls. We will examine the built-in project templates for creating controls (User Controls and full-blown custom controls) and then spend the majority of the time looking at the control visualization system - how to keep the behavior but change what a given control looks like. Blend makes this task much easier by providing designer support for the templates as well as the visual state behaviors.

Upcoming Dates & Locations