There are a few things that I’m going to try at this point.

Since I was unable to complete the last part of Chapter 9 before and was planning on returning to complete it, I’ll do that now – but using only Visual Studio, since i’m locked out of Blend for the time being.

I’ll see how far I can get with that.

The other plan which I have is to download Expression Design and create a few screensavers.  My husband asked me if it was possible to create one with WPF and I figure that it should absolutely be possible – in a Win32 application, if you can create a keyframe animation which was an executable, you just rename the .exe extention to .src with a few additional properties added to the code.  There is a little more to it, but not by much.  I honestly do not think there would be too much more to it, so I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes.  It’ll probably just be something incredibly simple, but if I can create it, I can create any type of screensaver.  I know of a few businesses that institute standardized screensavers across the entire company while removing access for the users to have their own personal settings, with the premise where they think it looks nice to see all screens the same – professional.  There is always a way to take something which could be considered as “frivolous” in a time where LCDs have become so incrediblly commonplace, and turn that frivolity of an item into something business-level professional.

I’ll blog with the results when I get there – blend being inaccessible is just giving me a new challenge to overcome.  I think I’ll embrace it until I can find a solution to my predicament with blend.

Update: The project at the end of chapter 9 was a synch to finish after having gone through the much more complex version of this in Chapter 12, so now onward to creating a WPF screensaver!

I decided that though these last 2 chapters were not quite correct, that I’d try them anyway, and see if I can wade through it by letting intellisense inform me of what I can or cannot do and from there, work with the debugger if I ran into any problems.

Seemed like a good idea, except for 1 important thing: My version of blend on my laptop was the full version of Blend 2.0 and it doesn’t include support for Silverlight 2, only 1.  Not to dispair though, I thought.  I’d noticed on the expression blend website that an SP1 update was available which gave Silverlight 2 support.

I downloaded it, installed and opened my updated Blend to have it report that my trial was expired.

Trial?  Wait a minute here.  My version was a full x86 version!

Attempt to uninstall causes the installer to crash.  An attempt to repair causes the installer to crash.

… I see only 2 options:

Manually hop through my regedit and update everything by hand.

Backup my data and install a fresh version of windows.

I’m now locked out of blend from my PC and my Macbook. *sigh*

I’m 3 chapters from the end, was working on my laptop and decided that I wanted more breathing room so I relocated to my PC to receive a message from blend:

*shakes head*

Back to the laptop :-/

As blogged about earlier, ZAM3D is no longer available for trial download.  Bummer – but the author has provided the XAML for us readers so that we may continue through this section.

If you’re following along in the book with me, that’ll be helpful.

Also, the Silverlight chapters (14 and 15) have revisions – sort of.

A quote from his… other blog other than the blog on his official book’s webpage:

It has been brought to my attention by some readers that the Silverilght chapters (13 and 14) are not compiling with Silverlight 2.0.  So, I have written two new articles (complete with source code) to accomplish the same goals (a paging system and a media player).  The paging system chapter is replaced with an article on how to use Silverlight 2.0’s new VSM (Visual State Manager) and Blend 2.5’s new State panel to make an Image Viewer.  The Media Player chapter is replaced by an article on how to create a very sleek Silverlight 2.0 media player with amazing mouse enter and mouse leave effects.  These articles will be part of the upcoming book update but you can get them now by emailing me at wpfauthor at gmail dot com. 

Already through chapter 12 – I may end up having to skip chapter 13 as it has me delve into using Zam3D again which as mentioned before, is no longer available for trial download.

So the last part of chapter 12 takes the exercise from the end of chapter 9 and then increases what you’re doing by having 3 different views.

So quick view of the final product is what many would consider to be a photo album. It has a drop-down menu which contains photos that you have statically assigned through C# custom class, 3 radial buttons which change the view, with the 3 views being a typical view of the images, a 3D skewed perspective of the images, and a 3D Cube which spins, all of which paint whichever image you’ve chosen over the chosen medium.

Its pretty dang cool.

I think I’m going to skip ahead to the 2 last chapters which deal with Silverlight, and then come back to chapter 13.