By the end of Chapter 5 of the book, I’ve discovered that yes, you can learn how to use this software without the assistance of a book, but had I been able to obtain this book a year ago when I started tinkering with Blend during my spare time, I would have greatly benefited from having this “in my back pocket” sort to speak.

The biggest confusion factor which I had when cutting myself off of Adobe products, cold turkey, to force myself to learn how to use Design and Blend, was the “when do I use the stackpanel over wrap panel?” or “Should I make this a canvas or a grid?”. Plus there was the creation of something primarily vector instead of part raster and part vector – that bit is something that illustrator gurus will likely not have any problems with, but most who design for the web tend to take preference to Photoshop – and only on occasion delve into primarily vector bases.

Now, the intent of this chapter was to get you familiar with the Layout elements and the unique attributes each layout element presents, however, there are underlying instructions which would assist a raster-based designer into being more comfortable with the ideas and ease when using vector shapes. They’re not that different to create and have the added scalability that raster(bitmap based) images just cannot do due to their innate nature.

In any event, the entire chapter is essentially “This is what X is, how about we apply this to give you hands-on experience with X”. We went over the following: Border, Canvas, DockPanel, Grid, Scroll Viewer, StackPanel, UniformGrid, ViewBox, and WrapPanel layout elements.

By the end of the chapter, the application is like a circus of vendors in graphical format. Victor is sure to mention in his book that he’s well aware of the lack of space towards the end.

Without further ado, I present my circus: