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The feedback from the Silverlight 4 application themes released and the latest in process have been overwhelmingly toward the positive.  We appreciate the feedback and hopefully you appreciate the transparency in the process.  As a developer I want my fellow brethren to appreciate good design and use it whenever possible … even as a default if you don’t have designers on board.

Feel free to use this plugin as you like. It is a simple plug in that shows information about the Twitter user right inline with the Tweet. This post will explain what the Sticky plugin does and of course I’ll share the plugin with you. I’ll follow up with another post to explain how to create a plugin using the Seesmic Desktop platform, Visual Studio 2010, and Expression Blend.

We’re turning this theme around FAST and I wanted to throw it out here in an initial iteration for preview and comment.  This is the ‘dark’ version of the theme and there will be a light version as well.  This represents only the core control set, but like the others will include other SDK controls as well.

Basically if you have situation where you need to either show or hide a visual element, you need to know what State you are in. As you can’t attach 2 different Triggers (Behaviours) to the same element, & expect to activate/fire them in an alternating manner with the same action (i.e. a mouse click). Blend will only ever fire one & continue to fire the same one. (The closest in the Z order i presume…) And my first thought was, that i needed some code to determine what state I was in. But you don’t!

He shows off some really cool samples, all of which you can download and do yourself through hands on-labs. Arturo walks through the .toolbox site and shows the numerous learning materials, videos, demos, and hands-on labs. If you have been looking for a comprehensive set of self-paced learning materials focused on designing  with Expression Blend, you should definitely watch this video and check out .toolbox.

The ContentControl is often overlooked when building Silverlight apps. It’s used inside many controls such as the Button or ChildWindow, but it also turns out to be quite useful on it’s own for separating content from presentation.

The challenging bit was getting the selected item in the list box to cast a glow on the things around it. The glow seems to escape the list box itself. The reason this wasn't straight forward is that the ListBox control clips its content to keep everything inside the scrollable area. My first instinct was just to set negative margins on something inside the ListBoxItem's template (ItemContainerStyle), but that's when it became obvious that it was being clipped.

Storyboards are one of the primary ways you create animations in Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone using Expression Blend. Creating a storyboard is fairly easy, but actually using a storyboard such as having it play is not. To help with this, you have the ControlStoryboardAction.