Randomness! Canvas properties

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As mentioned before, I’ve finally begun to go through Jeff Paries’ book on Silverlight 2, Animations, and I’m going through chapter 1.  In a nutshell, chapter 1 is a crash course on Blend 2, Codebehind, Silverlight and XAML.  The author at one point is describing the properties of a canvas and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the 1 property which to me stands out like a sore thumb.

As described in his chapter, Canvases can have properties  such as background, height, IsHitTestVisible, Left, Name, Opacity, Tag, Top, Visibility, and Width.

Most of them seem pretty standard, right?  But what about IsHitTestVisible? 

Seems a bit like an oddball.  Like having a basketball player standing among a group of japanese martial artists.

I'm not the engineer

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Its been about 2 weeks since I completed Victor Gaudioso’s book on Blend 2 and just after I wrote the review on his book, I blogged that next on the order of business was to start going through the newly released book by Jeff Paries, Silverlight 2 Animation – and then I ran into computer troubles.

If you’re actually interested in reading me blogging while pulling my hair out, by all means, look through the archives.  I think I blogged about it enough.

This blog posting is to say that finally, I’m able to begin going through this book by Jeff Paries (YAY!).

Before even getting to numbered pages, I’m reading the “Who this book is for” and am wondering.  He mentions that this book is intended for web developers – developers being the key word here.  As much as I enjoy getting my hands dirty in code, I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a developer.  I can comprehend code, I can tinker around with things or make things work, but to me, a developer is a whole lot… I don’t know.  I just don’t consider myself to be a developer.  I’m the half-and-half.  I do some cool, clean and shiny looking design work and tie it together with things that have already been created, and tinker until it works the way I want it to.  So where there are 3 parts, the pretty picture, the engine behind it, and the pieces that make the pretty picture interact with the engine … I am the one that usually is creating the pretty picture and putting in place the stuff that makes that pretty picture talk w/ the engine.  I’m not the engineer.

So hopefuly, I won’t get completely lost while going through this book.

We shall see.