If you’re like me – an Adobe freak who doesn’t even think about the keyboard hotkeys when you’re working in photoshop of illustrator, you won’t have to modify most of your habits.  Blend is programmed with these things in mind.

Another tip – since I was able to borrow a friend’s wacom tablet a few months ago, I’ve come to appreciate blend’s setup.  It feels more natural to use my tablet than my mouse.

I now have my own, btw.  Happy birthday to me back in November – husband purchased the latest bamboo:fun tablet.  It rocks.

All the crap that I usually skip when picking up a book… I’m reading it this time.  He has a level of whit mixed in with the information and its written as though he’s talking, not as though its a book.

The first chapter: Setting up the WPF Development environment is the only thing that I’ve been able to get through when I’ve tried going through this book in the past.  I’ve tried and had a few false-starts since the book’s release… there would always be something – computer-hanging and erroring when installing visual studios, sudden crashing – oh and harddrive failures?  It was as though the gods of … Silverlight(?) didn’t want me to get through this book when I was trying to get through it.

Lets see how far I get this time.

Anyhow, the first chapter is getting you set up.  That’s right – actually set up to go.  It assumes that you don’t know everything in the world about what you need to get moving with this – it makes no assumption besides the fact that you are wanting to go through the book and have a computer with basic capabilities and hard drive space.  In a world where 8 gig “thumb drives” are nearly as easy to find as an espresso stand in Western Washington, I think most anyone will be able to handle the minimum requirement of 5 gigs of free space on some form of storage media.

Though I’ve pushed myself fairly strongly into using blend, I feel that I am lacking in a few areas.  Where there is utmost certainty in creating much of anything in HTML and CSS and the varying ways to do certain things and going forward w/ the choice between those various ways based on circumstance, I still find myself having questions while working in Blend.  The software is just so new.  What might be considered as “best practice”?  What sort of containers, and how far should you go with organization?  Sometimes it can become absolutely crazy having things inside container after container after container.  Its like one of those christmas gifts which is inside a small box, but packaged, in humour, inside so many boxes that the final box is a quarter the size of a christmas tree!

In an attempt to cover those tracks and make the unknown into “known”, I have my “hands” on an electronic copy of Victor Gaudioso’s book, Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight I believe that it will be useful to comment on the various chapters as I go through the book.

More blogs will come shortly.

thinks she just heard a *ding!* advancing her skills of “parenting” after changing an aweful diaper… with weather-frozen baby wipes.

I don’t know what’s worse – the fact that I was nearly done and was saving before making minor adjustments; that illustrator crashed because I was trying to save, or that I was moronic enough to not save earlier in the project so that now everything that I’d done is lost besides the initial document created… as in white space.

ARG!!

@AlexBerger and thus, the river of Alex was formed