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!