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The Windows Phone 7 supports single and multi touch gestures. I have implemented the Tap, Double Tap and the Touch&Hold gestures using Triggers. You can use them to trigger an Action in Expression Blend.

You first have to reference the GestureTriggersLibrary. Then you add an Action to a control using the Behavior assets. Finally you change the TriggerType using the New button.

I have written a Silverlight Minesweepe game in October 2008. I just published an improved version on Silver Arcade which support right mouse click. I implemented it using the following RightMouseTrigger. You can set the SetHandled property to true. This stops the MouseRightButtonDown event from bubbling to it's parent.

I really love Behaviors, Actions and Triggers. I hope you like it too.

Anoop Madhusudanan has posted two articles about Behaviors, Triggers and Actions in Silverlight and WPF. In the first one he looks at behaviors and in the second one he discusses the triggers.

The objective of this article series is to give a quick overview of Behaviors, Triggers and Actions in Silverlight and WPF. Together, they enable a great deal of design time interactivity for your UI. They also make possible re-use and re-distribution of interaction logic.

Anoop Madhusudanan has a new project called Slex which is built on top of System.Windows.Interactivity framework and supports a couple of interesting Triggers and Actions.

 Presently Slex supports a couple of triggers including:

• EventTrigger – You can tie an event trigger against an element, or against your view model. Fired when an event is raised
• PropertyTrigger – You can tie a PropertyTrigger against an element’s property, or against a property in your view model. Fired when the property value changes

Also, Slex has a couple of abstract classes, including EventBasedTrigger andObserverTrigger, and you may use the ObserverTrigger to create custom triggers that make use of System.Reactive extensions.

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!

In his last article called TextBox Magic, Jeremy Likness showed how to create a dependency property to enable a textbox filter that would prevent anything but digits. In this article, he takes it a step further and turns it into a "true" behavior.

First, the behaviors can integrate with Expression Blend. You can define a behavior, import it into the tool, and literally drag it onto a control to attach the behavior. Second, behaviors automatically provide overrides to tap into the attach/detatch events. Third, behaviors are typed to their target controls: you may have a generic behavior that targets FrameworkElement or a specific behavior that targets TextBox. Finally, we can decorate behaviors with attributes that are discovered by Intellisense and available when attaching the behavior. 

In this article Jeremy Likness examines behaviors and triggers and as an example he uses a Storyboard.

One of the most powerful benefits of Silverlight is that it uses the DependencyProperty model. Using this model, you can create attached properties to describe reusable behaviors and attach those behaviors to certain elements.

Mark Tucker demonstrates setting the properties of Behaviors and Actions.

Behaviors and actions have properties of their own and it would be useful to be able to set those properties as a result of a trigger.

For this post, we will use the ShowMessageBox action that is part of the Expression Blend Samples CodePlex project.

I hope to have this introductory post as a semi-documentation for the toolkit and the features, so please bear with me as it does get long. Secondly, the next drop of nRoute will essentially be a superset of what's in this toolkit - namespaces and all will remain the same, however the toolkit doesn't include any routing or navigation related features.