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To go along with the Expression Studio 4 launch, the team has put together a new 5-day OnRamp training course. The course introduces the Expression Studio tools and is very useful as a first step into the wild world of Expression. The fifth day of the course leads you to the .toolbox site where more advanced courses and tutorials are provided.

He creates several demonstrations using the new DataStore and conditional behavior features in concert with several new behaviors including ChangePropertyAction, ControlStoryBoardAction, SetDataStoreValueAction, and the custom Mouse3DBehavior. Adam also shows how to create a custom behavior using code. Don't miss this episode as Adam discusses how behaviors can make the UI developer's job much easier.

I’ve been explaining the concept of Fluid UI, as a means to animate discrete properties.  The first example that comes to mind is the Visibility property of an element.  Its either Visible or Collapsed, there is no way to interpolate between the two values. When you change the Visibility property between different VisualStates and check the “Use Fluid UI” button, rather than instantly disappearing, Fluid UI will animate the opacity and scale transform to provide a visual transition between the discrete values.

The PathListBox is one of the newest features available in Expression Blend and Silverlight 4. It redefines how users look at lists of data as it breaks the mold of a list "box" and opens the possibilities to use any shape or path. Don't miss this episode and be sure to download Adam's sample code.

When building Silverlight and WPF applications that are composited (e.g. using MEF) or written to support UI customization, resources are loaded dynamically at run-time. This is a great solution on the development side, but can be a challenge when working on design tasks.  If your design surface can’t find the resources at design-time you are presented with zero styling or worse, XAML parsing errors.

Expression Blend 4 RC provides a new feature to support loading resources at design-time.

A refreshed Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP has been released this week which provides compatibility with Visual Studio 2010.  Matching the new tools, we’ve also released a new version of the Expression Blend Add-In for Windows Phone.

The new Setup tutorial takes full advantage of the Web Platform Installer (Web PI) which acts as a download and install tool for the needed Tools.  This makes writing the tutorial and installing much easier.

Along with the step by step guide, I’ve also updated the Getting Started series to reflect the new v4 tools and features, specifically CompositionTarget.Rendering (which is like ENTER_FRAME) and CompositeTransform (which makes transforms simpler than before).

After finding out about the Artefact Animator,  written by Jesse Graupmann, I knew I wanted to try it out.

The Artefact Animator library is based on the same concept as Tweener for Flash, which provides an easy way to do procedural animations in WPF and Silverlight.

I found some time last night to put together this little Xbox Live avatar mosaic and was very pleased with the results.