The media player which Victor’s book steps you through on chapter 6 is complete.  I customized it a bit and added a back button, which was coded essentially as an inverse of the next button.

As far as the user experience elements, the play button plays, stop button stops, and pause button pauses, however, the pause button was set up as a toggle, so if it is pressed while paused, it will resume play.

Cool part that I feel I should mention is that all of the visual elements are done in XAML. The buttons appear to have been done in photoshop or illustrator, but they’re not. They’re 100% XAML code.

The limitations which I’m seeing are as follows:

The logic behind the next and back buttons are limited.  If you hit next to get to the next video, that works, however, you hit it again, and it doesn’t toggle back to the original – it just replays the 2nd video.

The same goes for the back.  If its on the first video and its playing, and you hit the back button again, it restarts the first video.

The last bit which somewhat makes me internally twitch, is that at this point, these buttons are functional, but they don’t appear to interact with the user.  I know – we’ll likely get there further into the book, but at the very moment, I just have to take my knowledge that they do actually do something and pretend that the interaction with the buttons is there in a, “Perhaps I blinked?” sort of way.  We’re not far enough through the book to start making further interactions, but in the interest of my own sanity, I told all of my buttons to change the cursor to the “Hand” so as to make them somewhat appear as if they were more than pretty pictures on a gradient.

Below is the video:

Note: This is second published video which displays an example of what can be accomplished as you’re going through this book on Blend 2. To view the first video posted click here.