Blend for Visual Studio 2012 By Example Beginner’s Guide

Leverage the power of Blend to create, modify, and reuse applications and components for Windows using a practical, hands-on guide

About This Book

• Discover how to add storyboard and animation to the applications
• Find your way across the Blend IDE
• A practical approach to using SketchFlow to create, package, and communicate designs before actual implementation

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at developers and designers who are new to Blend and looking to learn Blend, not just practically, but also conceptually. This book does not assume any knowledge about Blend on the part of developers; however, some experience in design or development might be useful in understanding the concepts faster, but this book explains everything very simply so that you are able to understand everything with little or no effort.

What You Will Learn

• Learn about layouts and controls offered by Blend and how to use them
• Understand the need for and purpose of XAML and how to use it in Blend applications
• Create applications for Windows 8
• Add behaviors and states to our applications
• Explore vector graphics
• Create user and custom controls and reuse them across applications
• Understand data binding and use it in our applications

In Detail

Creating applications with compelling graphics has been one of the main goals of client applications, and with the arrival of WPF, Silverlight, and HTML5 it is much easier than ever before to create interactive and rich user interfaces.

Blend for Visual Studio 2012 by Example Beginner’s Guide will give you a good grounding in creating Windows, Web, and Windows Phone applications. You will also look at the various layouts and controls available in Blend and how we can create animations and behaviors in Blend.

Towards the end, you will be aware of the various capabilities that are available in Blend out of the box.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Blend
Chapter 2: Layout Panels
Chapter 3: Working with XAML
Chapter 4: Styles and Templates
Chapter 5: Behaviors and States in Blend
Chapter 6: Understanding Animation and Storyboards
Chapter 7: Understanding DataBinding
Chapter 8: Vector Graphics
Chapter 9: User Controls and Custom Controls
Chapter 10: Creating Windows Phone Apps
Chapter 11: Creating Windows 8 Store Apps
Appendix: Pop Quiz Answers