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Anoop Madhusudanan has posted two articles about Behaviors, Triggers and Actions in Silverlight and WPF. In the first one he looks at behaviors and in the second one he discusses the triggers.

The objective of this article series is to give a quick overview of Behaviors, Triggers and Actions in Silverlight and WPF. Together, they enable a great deal of design time interactivity for your UI. They also make possible re-use and re-distribution of interaction logic.

Mark Tucker demonstrates setting the properties of Behaviors and Actions.

Behaviors and actions have properties of their own and it would be useful to be able to set those properties as a result of a trigger.

For this post, we will use the ShowMessageBox action that is part of the Expression Blend Samples CodePlex project.

I hope to have this introductory post as a semi-documentation for the toolkit and the features, so please bear with me as it does get long. Secondly, the next drop of nRoute will essentially be a superset of what's in this toolkit - namespaces and all will remain the same, however the toolkit doesn't include any routing or navigation related features.

Mark Tucker has produced a series in which he creates a hidden object game using Silverlight 3 and behaviors, actions and triggers.

According to the Casual Games Association, there are over 200 million casual game players worldwide.  One genre of casual game is the hidden object game. Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst by Big Fish Games is one example.  You are presented with a picture full of images and a list of items you must find.  As you click on the item in the picture, it is crossed off the list.  When you find the last item, you progress in the story to the next location or puzzle.

In this blog post Bob Bartholomay discusses the BuildAction values for Silverlight files.

Certain file types are given default values for the BuildAction which make the most (only!) sense for certain file types:

• “XAML type” files like UserControl and Page are given “Page” build action
• Code Files (.cs and .vb) have “Compile”
• App.XAML will has its BuildAction set to “Application Definition”.  This defines the entry point of your application.

Behaviors make it easier for designers to be able to do cool things that would otherwise require writing code. Of course, a behavior doesn’t just magically appear out of thin air.* It requires someone actually writing it.

While one our goals was to make it easy for someone to write a Behavior, there is a certain amount of boilerplate code that you need to be aware of before you get to writing code that is more familiar to you. To help make that process easier, we are going to be providing Item Templates that can be accessed from both Expression Blend 3 as well as Visual Studio 2008.

Actions I believe are probably the most useful of the three sorts of Behaviors in Silverlight, the sheer amount of variation possible when composing these with events provides a lot of richfunctionality to the Blend user. The real power comes from having all this functionality at your drag and drop disposal, by quickly wiring this all together it leaves you more time for true functionality of your RIA.

For the most part we'll be adding or manipulating Silverlight / WPF Behaviors from Blend, but occasionally we'll need to manage these from code. Overall it's a pretty simple process. The main class we need to deal with is Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.Interaction, from here we can retrieve the Behaviors and Triggers collections for a DependencyObject.

A few weeks ago Kirupa Chinnathambi described the basics of Triggers and Actions. Now he has two new posts. The first one is about the basics of how to write a simple behavior. In the second part called "Behaviors and Commands" Kirupa shows how to 'trigger' your behaviors.

This wraps up my current series of posts describing Behaviors themselves. You may find yourself wondering why you would ever want to use a Behavior when Actions just seem much easier to use and conceptually understand. The answer is, for the most part, rarely.