As much as I thought I had a decent level of familiarity and proficiency with blend, I have to put my hands down and admit it now – I knew nothin’.

We started out by creating a shape in this chapter, turned it into a resource for the program to reuse, turned our back on the button and played around with  modifying the default system settings of List Boxes, and then returned with the information gained from our experience of changing the default system settings and took it further by adding our button style to a more root application resource dictionary and finally, after tinkering with the settings both by hand and by the visual designer, we turned that into a control which give us the ability to just simply click and drag out the newly created asset as an item on the toolbar.

This is freakin’ cool.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I kept allowing issues come in the way of going through this book.  Ahh… foresight.

The only thing that continues to bug me is that we’re creating buttons.  They’re supposed to DO stuff when you run your mouse over them and click!  I am assuming that he’ll get there, but its driving me nuts having what I’d call an “Image with function” as opposed to what this is supposed to be – a button – with all the characteristics of a button.  I am sometimes a patient person, but sometimes I choose to not be.

bahhh

Funny stuff.  I’m part way through chapter 7 – however far I am, I honestly don’t know.  Who’s counting anyway?

Excerpt from wherever the heck I am in chapter 7:

“… Earlier in this section, you learned that it is best practice to put all of your Styles in a ResourceDictionary, and you even learned how to do that.  So, why did I have you create your Button control Style inside of your Window1.xaml if it is not best practice to do so? …”

Most coming upon this would think that he was going to mention why it might be a strong point where best practice doesn’t always mean “always practice”.  But nope, his next line is:

“… Did I make a mistake?  Actually, yes I did…”

Most of the times mistakes allow someone to observe things from a perspective that they otherwise wouldn’t have seen something had they done it correctly.  Instead of covering that up or fixing it, he decided to use it and write that he’s using it for us to learn how to fix something of this nature.

I can see how this might commonly occur too – especially when using an interface like Blend – it would be a matter of accidentally not clicking the correct radial.  Quite likely, when doing things quickly.

Regardless of that – I found it amusing to read.

Edit: to save on having yet another frackin’ post here spamming twitter and facebook, I thought I’d add to this post since its so closely related to the above content.

Just after the comment, Victor delves into fixing the issue where someone has placed the style mistakenly within the xaml document instead of in the ResourceDictionary.

A point which is not mentioned which I find incredibly useful (though sometimes buggy – blame it on the application being a beta) is the use of split view.  Especialy when working with huge chunks of XAML and I’m not wanting to go into Visual Studio.  It has a really nice feature in blend’s split view.

So for those who are following, give this a try.  Doesn’t matter what you’re working on – if youhaven’t anything, just create a new project and add something – anything – to the workspace.

Now click on the tab labeled “Split” which you can find on the upper right of the screen.  Now click on an item within the Objects and Timeline menu.  Notice how the XAML for that item is highlighted within the XAML pane of your split view.

I find this to be quite useful.

My copy of this book is an electronic version, and though there are an aweful lot of advantages to having the electronic book (e.g. having it on a thumb drive to go through it whether I’m at work or at home) there are certain disadvantages as well.  The biggest of which is sometimes, a person needs to move their focus from the glare of the computer.  Often when I’m working with something complicated after hours of working, I’ll find my brain doesn’t want to absorb unless I print it out and have it in my hands…

For that – paper is happy.

My husband surprised me by doing 2-sided printing; he printed the entire book and bound it.

Crazy awesome.

About a quarter of the way into Victor’s book on Blend 2, he’s stepping us through the changing of the window’s default styling to specific items as they are displayed within a listbox.

Well he mentions that Blend doesn’t allow you to edit this visually, however, you can change it in the XAML – so he directs you to click on the tab which allows access directly to the XAML code.

In this area, I discover a feeling as though the world is closing in on me. Sometimes everything blurs together and I’d like to just see what I want to work with. Call me spoiled, but I really – REALLY enjoy that functionality which is present within Visual Studio.

I used to be a notepad girl – did almost everything in notepad, and with that, I was just fine.

But then I was given this project that had several hundred individual .ASPX pages which hooked into a whole lot of other resources. It was nearly impossible to continue in my elitist notepad hugging.

So I took in a deep breath, gave in to all the hype that I kept hearing from others who were doing similar work and their constant prodding for me to give up notepad in favor of Visual Studio, and I downloaded the dang program.

… I fell in love.

I’m spoiled now. For the modifications of XAML, I very much prefer to pop into Visual Sudio – so I’m going to do that now instead of following the book’s direction.

Shhh… don’t tell anyone!

I’m a few pages in on chapter 7 of Victor Gaudioso’s book on Expression Blend. He’s talking about the creation of custom control templates.

Essentially – creating items such as list boxes, buttons, radial buttons, and other things that many applications use the default which windows provides (windows xp’s standards look different than windows vista’s so sometimes when looking at other blogs related to Blend, you’ll notice that the buttons are either more shiny or more plain – this is because they’re giving the windows system default buttons or listboxes. For many people, these types of things are so “usual” that they don’t even think about them. They just use them – such is how UI should be, in my opinion).

Instead of using the windows default, we’re going to customize these controls.

I didn’t have this book back when I was researching on how to do this. I couldn’t find much of any information on it except for a few example downloads of full control sets on the MSDN website. So what I started doing was locating exactly where the controls were pointing to, downloading the custom sets from MSDN, and then hand modifying various areas of xaml to determine what works where. Making things horrid colors so that they’d stand out.

This chapter is already shaping up to rewrite how I have been creating these custom control sets. WAY easier than what I was doing before.

Thank Goodness.