Shedding some light into the dark... A video tutorial series on building Windows 8 App's with Expression Blend

Silverlight Show - Windows 8 Development + Blendability

"Introduction

Expression Blend is a “black unknown tool” for many XAML developers. Many geeks (including myself) tended to say things like “Hey ! I’m happy just coding XAML”, “This is for graphic designers”, “It doesn’t generate clean code”.

In this video article we are going to try to demystify this tool for developers, we will learn some basic features that will show us how we can boost our productivity. As a vehicle to explain the concepts and techniques here exposed we are going to write from scratch the following dummy puzzle app:

Takeaways from this article:

• How to create your UI using Expression Blend without having to manually code a single line of XAML.
• How to assign data binding via properties tab (no more typo-bug when adding a binding).
• How to display sample data to allow you fine tune your layout without having to run the app to check the visual aspect.
• How to drop controls and customize them (ListView + GridView).
• How to visually create and customize controls templates.
• How to assign Converters via properties.

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This is a series I need to watch. I've fired up Blend a few times and, well... that's about it. I've been doing allot of WPF dev in the past couple months and doing it badly (well shipping is a feature, right?). Now it's time that I start looking at doing it little better and using the righter tools for the job. Enter Expression Blend...