Share via


My very first blog on MSDN

Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 RC is launched today to the world.

My favorite feature in Silverlight 3 is the ability to install the silver app from web browser to your desktop.  It really bridges the web application into client world and speed up the installation as simple as 3 clicks. (Get Silverlight 3 RTM NOW!)

Since I’m a developer with Expression Blend, I could list a 100 new and fantastic features in Expression Blend 3 tirelessly, such as the revolutionary prototyping tool SketchFlow, animation with visual state manager, working with sample data, and the most exiting one for a developer as me is the extensible interface through Behaviors. (Try Expression Blend 3 RC with SketchFlow NOW)

Behavior is a brand new way to provide code behind.  As a developer, we’ve been used to event handlers, command bindings, or data bindings, through which we can provide code behind logics for the front end xaml UI.  However, i found myself have to explain these concepts to the our designers friends in team again and again and they still cannot understand why our developers make things so complicated.  It’s just like what I complained to them how “complicated” it is to draw a nice gel button with dozens of layers of highlights, shadows, reflections, glowing effects etc.

The Behaviors in Blend 3 SDK finally bridges the gap between developers and designers, well, not from the gel button side, but from the code behind side.  With Behaviors, our developers can write many preset code behind logics and designer can simple drag&drop them on art board or object tree and boom, it’s there, integrated and highly configurable and extensible.

This blog will discuss in more detail about how we developers can write these code behind and give our designer fellow a “wow” time and smile.  Tune in.