Search

It was just days before this year’s Halloween when I was searching for those nifty applications that let you play scary sounds directly from your mobile phone; thought that would be a great entertainment for my young daughter.

And it was.

Later I decided to create a similar application to run with Silverlight. I knew porting such application to Silverlight would be fairly easy, but the real challenge was in doing it with as less coding as possible. And how exactly do you write an application without writing code, some may ask?

Behaviors

Expression Blend 3 introduced a new way of adding interactivity to user interface elements, called behaviors.

I've been come really enamoured with the possibilities of Silverlight / WPF Behaviors, broadly they can be divided into three types, Triggers, Actions and Behaviors. The ability for non-programmers to compose behaviour and interactivity in Blend is very interesting.

Behaviors are new to Silverlight 3 and WPF. The main reason we now have Behaviors in Silverlight was due to the lack of support in Silverlight of triggers. Triggers in WPF are incredibly useful as they provide the ability to change the look and feel  of UI Elements dynamically based on the state of the application directly in the Xaml. In fact they are so useful we have 2 types Data Triggers and UI Triggers. Data Triggers can be used to respond to changes in the data that the UI Elements are bound to. UI Triggers can be used to respond to UI level events.

Andras Velvart will show you how to create the missing from Silverlight 3 Visualbrush.

Visualbrush basically allows you to create a brush based on a visual element (including its visual changes), and use it for painting other elements. A common use is to create the fashionable reflection effect.