Category: Facing Blend

Color Resources in Expression Blend

Posted on by ARSpaulding

One of the really nice tools that Blend has is the ability to set an item as a color resource for later use.  What this means is that I can set myself a really nice gradient or have a set of colors that I specifically need to stick to (i.e. logo or company colors) and I have those available as a nice resource tool and they’re as easy to designate (some might argue that they’re easier) than a color pallet created in Illustrator.

Well this lovely tool does have limitations where UI is coming into play.

So to describe this, I’m going to talk a bit about the details of my favorite elements (this is something that I geek out about and most step back thinking I’ve gone off the deep side in drama) – the hover, click, and go on buttons ( and objects which have been turned into “buttons” which really aren’t the standard thing that people might consider as a button ).

Something about a button that does more than just a button really gets me hyped.  You hover and it looks nice, you click and it does something, and then the transition between the click and the loading of… whatever.  That sort of thing really gets me hyped.  I guess my girliness shines through there… shiny objects really can entertain me at times.

This is where I find the limitation though in the color resources tool!

Sometimes I’m not the most proactively organized.  I’ll create my button animation effects on the fly.  Sue me for not thinking it ALL the way through.  Unfortunately Blend really does limit you in this.

What I’m refering to needs further example though.  So lets say I’m creating a button.  When my mouse hovers over the button, I want it to DO something to show me that hey, someone’s hovering over this and it has to do something more than just change the cursor to a pointed finger.  So I’m working on this and I come up with this INCREDIBLE gradient that just looks amazing, but its just a bit too dramatic for this button – but I LOVE the color usage.  I want it!

Well now there’s a problem.  See, I want to take those settings and add them to my color resources… but wait, when I try doing this, it just adds the base color used when the button is not actively being interacted with NOT the wonderful gradient created.

…

Very irritating.  I want my gradient of colors for other objects!!!

Creating a Silverlight project in Visual Studio vs. Blend

Posted on by ARSpaulding

You’d think that the creation of a project in either Blend or Visual Studio, that they would start the entire solution with the same files.

Unfortunately that is not the case, and this is bad, not good.

So I’m working on a project, it has a pretty reflection on it and a main background that doesn’t take away from the elements and the bad part is I started it in Blend.  So what happens when I run the silverlight application?

My SL Is in the contained box and the rest of my browser is WHITE.  I can modify this by going to the debug folder, but then I can only open build from visual studio, because blend wants to rewrite the debug html file every time it loads.

This means that when I want to center the object and make the rest of the background more cohesive… ugh!

————–

When creating a Silverlight project in Visual Studio, it not only creates the items a bit cleaner, it also creates a seperate set of folders – inside one of these folders is a beautiful basic HTML page (and an aspx page, to use HTML, you have to right-click and tell it to be the starter page) which houses the information and is editable… and the modifications stay regardless of the application that I’m using to test!

Eeeee!

I need a “tsk tsk” bird to come out of somewhere every time I forget to start a project in Visual Studio.

Cleaning up after Blend

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’m working on a Silverlight project and I was creating a few basic states for hovering my mouse over a button, clicking, and removing my mouse from a button.


Well it wouldn’t load!

The error that I was seeing was, “Unexpected PROPERTYELEMENT in parse rule PropertyElement ::= . PROPERTYELEMENT Content? ENDTAG..”

Uhm… What?

A google search shows a few things on Unexpected Directives but nothing that was helping me.

It said it was on line 0 character 0… that makes no sense.

However, there were 2 other errors coming up regarding fill elements.  So I decided to take care of those.  For some reason, Blend 2 added several Elipse.Fill elements with no properties and child Ellipse.Fill elements which also contained no properties.  I cleared that up in Visual Studio, went back to Blend and Blend wanted to update like it should.  Cool – well I switched back to visual studio and blend put those dang things in again!  Ugh.

So I closed Blend, praying that all the work that I’d just done wasn’t going to be one of those instances where it’d take less time to recreate than to debug.  I opened the project in Blend and was relieved to see now that Blend didn’t like the XAML either.  Cleaned out the excess ellipse.fill elements, saved, came back to blend, told it to update and… yay!  There aren’t any errors.

That lack of errors includes the strange error mentioned earlier.

Randomness! Canvas properties

Posted on by ARSpaulding

As mentioned before, I’ve finally begun to go through Jeff Paries’ book on Silverlight 2, Animations, and I’m going through chapter 1.  In a nutshell, chapter 1 is a crash course on Blend 2, Codebehind, Silverlight and XAML.  The author at one point is describing the properties of a canvas and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the 1 property which to me stands out like a sore thumb.

As described in his chapter, Canvases can have properties  such as background, height, IsHitTestVisible, Left, Name, Opacity, Tag, Top, Visibility, and Width.

Most of them seem pretty standard, right?  But what about IsHitTestVisible? 

Seems a bit like an oddball.  Like having a basketball player standing among a group of japanese martial artists.

I'm not the engineer

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Its been about 2 weeks since I completed Victor Gaudioso’s book on Blend 2 and just after I wrote the review on his book, I blogged that next on the order of business was to start going through the newly released book by Jeff Paries, Silverlight 2 Animation – and then I ran into computer troubles.

If you’re actually interested in reading me blogging while pulling my hair out, by all means, look through the archives.  I think I blogged about it enough.

This blog posting is to say that finally, I’m able to begin going through this book by Jeff Paries (YAY!).

Before even getting to numbered pages, I’m reading the “Who this book is for” and am wondering.  He mentions that this book is intended for web developers – developers being the key word here.  As much as I enjoy getting my hands dirty in code, I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a developer.  I can comprehend code, I can tinker around with things or make things work, but to me, a developer is a whole lot… I don’t know.  I just don’t consider myself to be a developer.  I’m the half-and-half.  I do some cool, clean and shiny looking design work and tie it together with things that have already been created, and tinker until it works the way I want it to.  So where there are 3 parts, the pretty picture, the engine behind it, and the pieces that make the pretty picture interact with the engine … I am the one that usually is creating the pretty picture and putting in place the stuff that makes that pretty picture talk w/ the engine.  I’m not the engineer.

So hopefuly, I won’t get completely lost while going through this book.

We shall see.

Hitting every bump in the road

Posted on by ARSpaulding

Last week’s SeattleD2ig meeting I became the proud new owner of a shiny new box filled with Expression goodness – the MS Expression Studio is MINE!

Uninstall my previews, verify that I did in fact install .net 3.5 SP1 as remembered, and then install the new shiny MS Expression Blend w/ key and all.

OOoohh… but its Blend 2.0.  Can’t do Silverlight.  Shoot.

So I download the Service Pack for Blend 2, and commense installation to see this lovely gem after accepting the TOS:

Windows Installer returned error code 1605
Windows Installer returned error code 1605

I’ll post if/when I discover how to get past this issue. I’m beginning to feel that if there are any bumps to be experienced on a roadway where it comes to working with Blend or anything related, I’m bound to find them.

Ugh.

 

Update: I discovered the cause of my issue.  The version which is in the MS Expression Studio was Expression Blend v. 1   Not Blend 2.

Uninstalling the version from the box, installed one from the MSDN website and applied the key from the box then tried to run the SP1 installation update: Lovely lovely installation success.