For all future news and updates concerning Expression Blend, please visit our new team blog called BlendInsider. The BlendInsider blog will provide you with the types of content you found here…and hopefully much more!

This blog will be kept around for archival purposes, but no new content will be added.

See you all “on the Inside!”

Cheers,
Kirupa

Overview of Expression Blend for Windows Phone 7
The first video on this list is one that walks you through, at a breakneck speed, most of the new features we added to Expression Blend to help make building Windows Phone 7 apps easier:

Through the guise of building a Bing Search application, I cover features ranging from our Device Panel to Application Bar support to creating Sample Data from a Class file. You can learn more about these features by looking at some of my more in-depth Windows Phone 7-focused articles.

Windows Phone Design Templates
Billy and Unni are up next to showcase some of the templates they created to make creating common Windows Phone 7 UI layouts really easy:

The templates they created cover a wide range of common UIs that you will see, so feel free to use these directly in your own projects or simply as a source of inspiration. Before you can do any of that, of course, download the templates from codeplex first.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below. If you recorded some interesting videos, post them in the comments as well.

Cheers,
Kirupa =)

Windows Phone Developer Tools

This installer will automatically install free, phone-flavored versions of Expression Blend, Visual Studio 2010, and XNA Game Studio.

If you already have Expression Blend 4 installed, unlike earlier releases, running this installer will update your existing version of Expression Blend 4 and give you the ability to create Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone applications:

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback over the past number of releases to help us get to this stage. As always, if you have any additional feedback, feel free to post them on the Windows Phone Developer Forums.

- The Expression Blend Team

First, download everything you need below:

Windows Phone Developer Tools (Beta)

As you can see, you no longer need to download and install Expression Blend separately. You can just run the single Windows Phone Developer Tools installer and get Windows Phone variants of Expression Blend, XNA Game Studio, and Visual Studio for free.

Note
This version of Expression Blend installs and runs side-by-side with Expression Blend 4 and only supports working with Windows Phone projects.

New Features
As mentioned earlier, beyond supporting the changes made to the runtime since the last release, we’ve added a lot of new functionality that makes designing Windows Phone 7 applications easier. Some of the more notable features are described below.

Improved Design Time Previewing
Because your applications can be viewed in different orientations, themes, and accent colors, we’ve made it easier for you to visualize within Expression Blend what your application would look like.

All of this functionality is exposed via the improved Device panel:

The Device Panel now provides you with easy access to preview between Landscape and Portrait orientations, Light and Dark themes, and Accent color.

For example, here is a preview of what your application looks like in the default Dark theme:

Clicking the Light theme button in the Device panel swaps out all of the dark theme resources to display the light theme variants of them:

This allows you to design and make sure that your applications look the way you want regardless of which light/dark mode the user has their phone in.

Preview Text Styles
Windows Phone 7 applications emphasize consistent use of text as a key design element. To make it easier for you to preview and apply existing text styles, we’ve added the ability to preview inline what a particular text style would look like:

Initial Application Bar Design Experience
One of the unique and differentiating features found in Windows Phone 7 when compared to Silverlight and WPF is the Application Bar:

In this release, we have exposed a very early preview of our support for allowing you to design the Application Bar. You have the ability to create an Application Bar, add Application Bar Buttons, and add Application Bar Menu Items. Because Application Bar Buttons display a 48x48 PNG icon, you can specify your own icon or pick from a collection of icons we have provided for you:

A future blog post will go over in greater detail how to use what you have today to design a working Application Bar!

Easier Page Navigation
Because Windows Phone applications are very page centric, we decided to make navigating between pages easy. To navigate from one page to another, we exposed a Navigate To context menu:

This menu can be accessed when you right click on any element that you wish to start the navigation when clicked.

Updated FluidMoveBehavior
We have revised the FluidMoveBehavior to be on par with the improvements we made for Silverlight 4 and .NET 4. You can learn more about what this means by reading Kenny Young’s blog post on this topic.

Optimizing the On-screen Keyboard
Unlike Silverlight and WPF where a full keyboard for input is almost always guaranteed, Windows Phone users may not have that luxury when working on their phones. While a on-screen keyboard is available, given the size of the screen, having the full keyboard with all of the keys appear on-screen may not be ideal for all situations either. It may be helpful to users if the keys displayed were optimized for the type of information they would be entering at that particular moment.

To address that need, we improved our support for the InputScope property on TextBox that allows you to specify what kind of data will be entered:

For example, if Number was selected for the InputScope on a TextBox, here is what the on-screen keyboard looks like when you focus on it on the emulator/device:

Notice that you are not seeing the traditional full keyboard. Instead, you are seeing a keyboard optimized only for numerical input.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to comment below or post on our forums.

Thanks,
Expression Blend Team

You can view those sessions given by Unni/Alan and Dave below:

You can browse through all of the sessions by clicking here.

Cheers,
Kirupa =)

As you can probably guess, it is our goal to help you use Expression Blend, Visual Studio, and our related tools to create those great applications. We spend a great deal of time adding new features and making existing features better to help you do just that. Making improvements to the applications is only one side of how we try to help you create great applications, however.

The other side involves helping you better understand how to actually create great applications, and we try our best to provide some valuable training resources. Some notable shoutouts include the .toolbox and the Expression Community sites. While looking at videos or reading tutorials is useful, we wanted to go further and also provide you with a library of xaml+code samples that showcase something small, something specific, something cool. We felt that, in many cases, simply being able to deconstruct how something was done can be equally (if not more useful) in learning how to do something.

This library of xaml+code snippets, known better by its friends and family as the Pattern Library, lives as an extension to the Expression Gallery:

You can learn more about the Pattern Library by reading Lars Power’s newsletter article introducing it.

Please feel free to download and play with the patterns. If there is something you feel is missing, please feel to let us know or just create it yourself and upload it.

Cheers,
Kirupa =)

Expression Studio 4 Ultimate

Keep watching this blog for more news, updates, and in-depth looks at some of the new features that we’ve introduced. Until then, here are some related links:

1. Microsoft Expression home page
2. Christian Schormann’s blog
3. Soma’s Favorite Expression Studio 4 Features

Note that if you are currently doing Windows Phone development, please do not upgrade to the final version of Expression Blend 4 yet. We will release an updated version of all of our phone components in the future, so please continue using Expression Blend 4 RC.

Of course, no major release would be possible without the feedback all of you have provided, so thank you!

- Expression Blend Team

Visit the Carousel tutorial to see how to create this example, and you can view all PathListBoxUtils-related tutorials here on .toolbox.

Happy scrolling!

Joanna

Storyboards are one of the primary ways you create animations in Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone using Expression Blend. Creating a storyboard is fairly easy, but actually using a storyboard such as having it play is not. To help with this, you have the ControlStoryboardAction.

What is it?

Simply put, the ControlStoryboardAction is an Action that allows you to select a storyboard and specify what you would like to do to it:

Let’s look at some of the properties it contains in greater detail.

Using It

When it comes to this behavior, there are only two properties that you need to concern yourself with. They are the ControlStoryboardOption and Storyboard properties.

The ControlStoryboardOption property lists the tasks you would like to perform:

From here you can choose whether you want to play a storyboard, stop it, toggle between play/pause, pause, resume, or jump to the end.

The only missing piece so far is knowing which storyboard to affect. Not to worry, because you specify the storyboard using the aptly named Storyboard property:

This property will list all of the Storyboards your behavior has access to. Once you have selected a Storyboard, you are done!

StoryboardCompletedTrigger

Another little behavior component we have is the StoryboardCompletedTrigger:

This trigger invokes an Action when a specified storyboard (set via the Storyboard property) has fully run to completion. Of course, because it is a trigger, you can use it with any Action.

Cheers,
Kirupa =)