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Silverlight provides a variety of brushes that can be used to paint just about any area in your app: from text to shapes to borders. The most common brushes are for painting color and images: SolidColorBrush,LinearGradientBrush, RadialGradiantBrush, and ImageBrush.However, today I paired the less common VideoBrush with an unusual visual element.

System.Windows.Media.Color structure represents colors as 4 channels: alpha (opacity) channel and 3 channels for each core color (red, green and blue). aRGB color space is good for representing colors but it’s quite problematic to control such properties as brightness with these 4 channels. We will convert our colors to and from a HSB color space which is good at exactly what we need – controlling such perceptual color characteristics as hue, saturation and brightness.

Silverlight is a formidable option for delivering rich web content. There are some obvious flaws still, but for a program in its earlier stages, It has some pretty muscular legs. I would love to see some more exploration into making this a more powerful design tool with options for transparent video and blending modes, a much stronger typography engine, and options for guides and guide layers.

You will learn how to use different types of brushes, and the special emphasis is given to gradient tools. How to create and modify gradients, using the gradient eyedropper and other goodies!

Creating an ImageBrush in Blend has always been a multi-step process. Blend 3 makes a few improvements in the steps necessary for creating a ImageBrush.  You can still use the traditional way if you desire.

First off, what is a DrawingBrush? It's one of the three kinds of TileBrushes that WPF recognizes (along with ImageBrush and VisualBrush). Simply put, it allows you to use a Drawing as a brush, to use on any arbitrary shape.

So, what's a Drawing? A Drawing is simply a set of Visual Elements. You can use pretty much any visuals, rectangles, buttons, Images, etc... but once they become a Drawing, they are no longer interactive.

Silverlight 3 provides validation mechanism while using Two-Way data binding. Silverlight 3 also provides default a Validation Exception UI – callout with exception details, which could be customized. Many input-related controls such as TextBox, CheckBox, etc. have built-in support for validation. How to use? Simple, like everything with Silverlight: To enable validation, use the ValidatesOnExceptions property.

Walt Ritscher has written a tutorial in which is explained how to create and use a tile brush.

Now that more developers and designers are adopting Expression Blend it seems like a good idea to learn how Blend handles Tile brushes.  For this example I am using an ImageBrush but the similar techniques apply to the DrawingBrush and VisualBrush.