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Laurent Bugnion from GalaSoft announced that the project and item templates allowing to create pre-wired MVVM Light applications are now also available for Expression Blend 3 and Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4 and Silverlight 4.

The installation process is manual, but not difficult at all (unzipping a few files to predefined paths). I did document the installation process here.

Of course the templates are also available for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010, as well as the binaries. The source code is available on Codeplex. 

Andy Beaulieu's Coding4Fun tutorial on creating a pinball game in Silverlight is now available.

In this tutorial, we'll create a Silverlight pinball game using Behaviors, a new addition to Expression Blend 3 & Silverlight that allows you to create interactivity with little or no coding. Below you'll find a video and step-by-step walkthrough.

In this post Andy Beaulieu explains how to share Workspace settings across multiple users in Blend.

For example, you may have set up the perfect Workspace for completing a task, and want to share this with other users in your team. While Blend does not support this natively, we can hack around a bit to get a Workspace copied to another machine.

I then show you a real world example where you would use a timer in Silverlight.

We will be using Behaviors so that you won't need to program a single line of code.  Please be aware that there are many ways to create custom controls  depending your desired end result, and this particular solution may not be perfect for every situation.  However, the purpose of this tutorial is to help encourage you to think outside the box and create your own UI without the fear of "re-inventing the wheel".

In this post Walt Ritscher talks about the Effects pane in Expression Blend 3 and announces that he will be releasing a new ShaderGallery.

I thought it would be a good idea to add these shaders to Expression Blend.  I talked to a few of my WPF Disciple buddies, they thought it was a great idea too.  I pinged Adam Kinney and a couple of Microsoft friends and asked them if they knew of anyone developing a Blend effects library.  Adam said, “No, I don’t know of any but would love to have one.” 

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.

In order to observe the loading experience and get a chance to test a simple animation, I included two sample video files in the project. Therefore the initial loading is incredibly slow. The animation has no complicated tricks; it only manipulates the opacity property and runs forever in autoreverse mode. Actually it runs until you are hypnotized by all the blinking!

It uses some simple animations to flip the hours, minutes and seconds. I hope you like it.