Comments on: The importance of learning Expression Blend

By: austin avrashow

austin avrashow — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:40:33 +0000

Best way to learn Blend (esp if you already know some WPF) is watching video training from http://www.totaltraining.com

Try it. You can watch the first couple of videos of any series free (there’s a series on WPF I also enjoyed).

By: peteohanlon

peteohanlon — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:29:17 +0000

Just found a load of Blend vids at http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=384 . I haven’t had a chance to play with them yet, but they do look pretty good.

By: David

David — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:32:01 +0000

Speaking of learning Blend…here’s ScottGu’s intro to Blend 2.5 in his new Silverlight 2 blog series: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/28/first-look-at-using-expression-blend-with-silverlight-2.aspx

By: Designer WPF » Blog Archive » Special Leap Day Link-O-Rama

Designer WPF » Blog Archive » Special Leap Day Link-O-Rama — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:50:59 +0000

[...] Smith says that designers should be learning Blend because it’s freaking awesome. Designers respond that, while he’s not wrong, there are bloody no good books or blogs on the [...]

By: peteohanlon

peteohanlon — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:58:04 +0000

Yup, and every time I start up Blend I end up completely lost and confused. I’m waiting on some decent books to get up to speed with Blend. From what I’ve seen of it, it is amazingly powerful but it’s way beyond me at the moment.

By: Josh Smith

Josh Smith — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:10:41 +0000

Tim,

It might just be a matter of timing. I don’t know when you started to learn WPF, but when I started learning WPF, it was still called Avalon. Blend was still called Sparkle, and Sparkle sucked. So, I never used it. I learned WPF from the “inside-out”, as opposed to “outside-in.” Now that Blend is a more mature product, I can definitely see the benefit of learning it in tandem to learning WPF.

I have nothing against Blend. I just don’t use it, yet.

Josh

By: Tim Haughton

Tim Haughton — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:27:08 +0000

I find it odd that you say that. We’ve done some pretty cool stuff on the Ergo project (www.yourergo.com) and a great deal of it has been done in Blend. Blend and Visual Studio are always open on my system, and I couldn’t imagine how much harder the job would have been without it, especially with VS2005’s WPF support being so poor.

Having said that, I think we have used Blend less as time went on. Whether that meant we were getting better at WPF/XAML or whether it meant the finer detail stuff required more code and less XAML, I don’t know.

By: » Daily Bits - February 20, 2008 Alvin Ashcraft’s Daily Geek Bits: Daily links, development, gadgets and raising rugrats.

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:08:51 +0000

[...] The Importance of Learning Expression Blend (Josh Smith) [...]

By: Tanuljunk Blendni! - VBandi

Tanuljunk Blendni! - VBandi — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:45:05 +0000

[...] Sok fejlesztő úgy gondolja, hogy a Blend az designer eszköz, neki jó lesz a VS-be épített Cider (brrr), meg a Xaml editor. Így volt ezzel a WPF-ben nagy névnek számító (és amúgy Client App Dev MVP) Josh Smith is. Aztán találkozott egy designerrel, aki három kattintással megoldotta azokat a dolgokat, amikkel ő hosszú perceket vagy akár órákat szenvedett. És Blend fan lett. [...]

By: Neal Sanche

Neal Sanche — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:33:14 +0000

I’ve come at WPF from the direction of annoyance with having to learn XAML, so I’ve used blend all along, and am just learning small things about XAML by the effect that Blend has when editing that XAML. I think more developers should use Blend so that a few more useful features will get included.

For example, one feature I’d really like to see is that if an object, being used as a CLR data source in Blend, implements the ICustomTypeDescriptor interface, I’d like to see the dynamic properties also displayed in the list of available properties in Blend. I may be dreaming about this, though.

Enjoy your learning of Blend. I like it quite a lot.

-Neal