Robin Paardekam

.NET Newbie - Silverlight, Sharepoint, AJAX and C#.

My first Silverlight animation using Expression Blend

A few days ago I downloaded the May-preview of Expression Blend 2. I wanted to have a look at the Silverlight-options it offers. I was surprised to see that this download took not more then 26 Mb. After I installed it I had a first look at the darkgrey, industrial-looking interface. Except for the use of the grey colours it reminded me about Macromedia Flash. I played around a bit with Macromedia Flash several years ago and I guess that for designers who have experience using Flash, Blend will be very easy to use. It's quite intuitive once you get used to the collapsing panels and the lack of rightmouse-context menu's.

After previewing this 30-day trial of Blend 2 I decided to get the full-version of the current Blend version as well to create my first Silverlight application. I should have known that Silverlight is not an available projecttype in "Blend 1", it only offers projecttypes "Standard application (.exe)" and "Control Library". So if you want to create Silverlight animations you should have a look at the trial of Blend 2. I must admit that I did not have any difficulties creating animations using the timeline, but adding interactivity is a hurdle I have to overcome in the next few days. I think it has something to do with limited functionality in the preview: the controls-pane does not show any button-controls, where the "regular" version of Blend has a much more extended assetlibrary (one of those assets is the button control).

Additional information:

My first creation is attached to this post (it's a WMV-file, wrapped in a ZIP-file and it should show you a web-banner animation). I will probably work on some other Blend-projects in the next weeks so I will post those creations (or links to them) if it all works out well. Any hints on creating Silverlight projects are welcome!

Posted: 06-01-2007 9:53 PM by Robin Paardekam | with 7 comment(s)
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Comments

Stephan Dekker said:

Did you b.t.w. have a look at the sourcecode of the rendered HTML? sweet...

I'm starting to like silverlight more and more...

# June 2, 2007 10:06 AM

Robin Paardekam said:

Yes I did... It looks great!!! The only thing you need is those JavaScript include files, one of which will call the XAML-file and then in your code you just have to call a JavaScript method to initialize the SilverLight object. Embedding it on your site works much better then doing the same with a Flash movie if you ask me!

Bye bye Flash, hello Silverlight! ;-)

# June 2, 2007 1:31 PM

Joon said:

Hey, I'm try to create presentation or Full Website by Silverlight. Animation that's OK but I cannot create button and I don't know how to make it work (active links) It's to difficult more than Flash. I think. and Tool Bar not make sense.  :(

# June 13, 2007 9:14 AM

Robin Paardekam said:

Hello Joon, as I mentioned as well I did not yet manage to get a button control in my Silverlight banner. Seems that the button control is not available in the Blend 2 May Preview version. When you use the "released version of Blend" you will probably have no problem with that whatsoever. Have a look at this video where all kinds of buttons can be seen in the Asset Library:

download.microsoft.com/.../VEBMKT_02_450x253_Disc.wmv

Which version do you use and what type of project did you select exactly when initially creating the project?

# June 13, 2007 8:41 PM

Foof said:

I got the Full version Blend 1 and was a little disappointed to find there was a blend 2 and no support for Silverlight in blend 1. I've just decided to get a refund(hopefully) on Blend 1 and wait for a product that isn't such a beta.

# July 26, 2007 7:19 PM

Ajit said:

Hey, where is the download..

# October 19, 2007 5:03 PM

funanani said:

my animation on the project i created are not showing when viewing the project in the browser, but it plays on the application(expression blend)

what is the cause of that

# July 10, 2008 11:33 AM
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