This week I attended a silverlight workshop. It was very interesting to see how Microsoft has taken on the design and programmatic world and combined them together.
The workshop primarily was working with Blend 2, though we got demonstrations in Blend 3 as well.
What I did like is the different styles that could be easily added to the controls within the Silverlight/Blend environment.
Here is some examples of how the controls can be styled:
This image is courtesy of http://blogs.msdn.com/corrinab/
To do this you need to create resources in the top of the Page.xaml, and then it is a matter of referencing them. Here is an example:
<!-- Resources -->
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="BaseColorBrush" Color="Tomato"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="BorderBrush" Color="#FF333333"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="ForegroundBrush" Color="#FF333333"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="HoverBrush" Color="WhiteSmoke"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="HyperlinkBrush" Color="Tomato"/>
Other aspects of the workshop was understanding how animations work by creating a storyboard.
It was a long and enjoyable week and has given me a new appreciation to creating and building Silverlight applications.
