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In this 12 minute video, Victor Gaudioso shows how to create a Visual State Group with Visual States, how to add a Condition to the GotoStateAction Behavior by making a Data Store and adding a Boolean Property.

Source: Victor Gaudioso's Silverlight Blog

Topics covered:
1. The Visual State Group and Visual States;
2. The GotoStateAction Behavior to fire a Visual State;
3. Creating a Condition for the GotoState Action;
4. Creating a Data Store and adding a Boolean property;
5. DataBinding the value of the new Boolean property to a TextBlock;
6. Changing the value of the new Boolean property using the SetDataStoreValue Action Behavior.

In this part, Phil Middlemiss takes a look at how to handle browser zoom with visual states.

Source: Silverlight Scratchpad

The ability to adjust the magnification level in your browser (using zoom + or -) has the potential to ruin your carefully crafted UI design. In Part 1 we took a look at the mechanisms involved in browser zoom and the effect it can have on your Silverlight app (particularly the EnableAutoZoom setting).

In this part we are going to handle browser zoom with visual states and use an attached behaviour that allows us to integrate zoom management into our views and control templates from Blend, without having to write any code.

                                                     This article has been deleted on Code Project!

Gagan Kapoor demonstrates a cool way of handling visual states on xaml.

Source: The Code Project

A nice and cleaner way of handling visual states on xaml is setting the states from ViewModel rather than setting Visibility of each control using Binding and then setting binding at viewmodel. Creating visual state groups simplify concept of understanding the UI and gives more flexibility for designers to work on it independently. Below I have designed simple example to demonstrate the concept.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

This article is Part 1 of “A classic memory game”:

• A classic memory game: Part 1 – Designing the game
• A classic memory game: Part 2 – The game logic, connecting the ViewModel and the View
• A classic memory game: Part 3 – Porting the game to Windows Phone 7 

Introduction

My wife has started learning Silverlight and because of my Expression Blend skills are still lacking, we have decided to build the following classic memory game so both of us can learn something new. We kept things simple but we respected basic Silverlight principles.

Timmy Kokke has posted a tutorial on how to create and use the Visual State Manager in Custom Controls in Silverlight using Visual Studio and Expression Blend.

Source: Timmy Kokke's Blog

Visual States are an easy way to change the looks of your controls based on certain states. This state can be something like a mouse hover, some invalid state or any state you need in a control.

Ever since wooly mammoths roamed the earth, you have had the ability to move between visual states. Not only could you move between states, you could do it in style by altering the duration and specifying an easing function.
Starting with Expression Blend 4, the awesomeness of moving between states has been kicked up a few notches with the introduction of transition effects.

The FocusVisualElement is the equivalent of the dotted line that you see in Windows interfaces and on browser pages around an object on the page that “has the focus”. This means that it will receive the input a user is giving with a mouse, keyboard or touch. Actually, web designers don’t really like these dotted lines, because they degrade the look of their interface. It may disturb the carefully crafted look and feel of the page. But this FocusVisualElement has a function.

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!

What are these things – are they different ways of doing the same task? When would I use one in preference to another? Do they all work in all project types?

This post will try to answer those questions by describing the animation and control customization tools that are available to you in Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow, and discussing what jobs each tool is meant to do. I’ll be classifying project types along two independent axes: WPF or Silverlight, and Blend or SketchFlow.