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.