Introduction

If you work with Silverlight or WPF, you have probably met the phrase “MVVM”. Almost everyone who is anyone in the WPF / Silverlight scene has their own MVVM framework, and their own way of explaining and teaching MVVM. Scary terms like IoC, Dependency Injection, Commanding Frameworks, Event Aggregators, Unit Testing, etc just roll off the tongue of the MVVM experts. This is one of the reasons why MVVM is intimidating for a lot of people. Still, you can create perfectly valid MVVM applications without even knowing what those terms mean.

Introduction

In the first part of the series, I introduced the application, and created the “ugly duckling” version, where the end user could already browse the and watch the videos. In this part, I am going to add some bling to the app – namely the Intro animation, the ability to skip it, and to replay it. The Intro animation itself is not created with Silverlight, so I will just use it as a video. This part takes heavy use of Visual States, Behaviors and Easings.

Visual States

The application builds on Sample Data for displaying the videos’ metadata, and it uses Visual States to differentiate between the states of the application.

In the first part of the series, I introduced the application, and created the “ugly duckling” version, where the end user could already browse the and watch the videos. In this part, I am going to add some bling to the app – namely the Intro animation, the ability to skip it, and to replay it. The Intro animation itself is not created with Silverlight, so I will just use it as a video. This part takes heavy use of Visual States, Behaviors and Easings.

That screencast is connected with the Transforming an Ugly Duckling to a Graceful Swan with Expression Blend and Silverlight - Part 2 Intro Animation article.

Here is what happens in the screencast:

Introduction

As I promised earlier on Silverlight Show, this screencast series will show how to create the showcase application shown on www.response.hu (you may want to read the interview to get some background information on the project). The screencast series shows a real life example of how designers can add value to a project, and how a developer can support this effort by creating small, reusable behaviors that allow the designer to tweak things to shape the end result to be exactly as he wanted it.

The first screencast shows how to create the ugly version that I am going to work from in the later parts of the series. The ugly version lists all the videos (or ReferenceItems), and allows the user to see the explanation and play back the showcase videos.

That screencast is connected with the Transforming an Ugly Duckling to a Graceful Swan with Expression Blend and Silverlight - Part I article.

Here is what happens in the screencast:

With the rapid development of Silverlight as a line-of-business technology, we are seeing more and more interesting, attractive, user-friendly business applications based on it. One such application is successfully showcasing the works and achievements of its author.

We introduce you to Silverlight MVP András Velvárt and the story behind the creation of his portal http://response.hu/, and two of his award-winning projects.