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[Mini-Tutorial] Blend 3: Rich Interactivity with No Code

  • Article

The idea of creating rich interactivity without code should sound very appearing to designers, because we want to turn static UI into interactive prototypes and test out our design ideas quickly. In Blend 3, “Behaviors” are packaged, re-usable building blocks of interactivity. They can be visually applied to UI components in the application using drag and drop. No more opening up Visual Studio and writing routine code like starting an animation when a button is clicked. Blend 3 will have bunch of commonly used Behaviors shipping with the tool, but they are extensible so that you or your developers can create your customized Behaviors.

After watching Peter Blois’ MIX talk “Creating Interactivity with Microsoft Expression Blend,” I experienced the power of Behaviors myself in the tutorial below. For example, I used 3 different triggers( Mouse Click, Timer, and Mouse Gesture) to play the slideshow behavior. You can download many interesting Behaviors that the community are making at Expression Gallery page.

You can also download the video here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Expression,Expression Blend 3,Behaviors,Mini-Tutorial

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2009
    Hi, your silverlight app is not running (just the Get Silverlight Logo is seen) in spite of the fact that I have the SL3 runtime plugin installed.

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2009
    Can you tell us exactly how you associate the .dll into the behaviors category? When I download a zip file out the gallery I get a full project. How do I convert that into a reusuable behavior in blend?

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2009
    Hi Przemek, The tutorial video is in Silverlight 1, so you should be compatible to SL2 or SL3. Can you play any other video on my site? Thanks, Qixing

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2009
    Hi Tony, After you download a project, you can go into the Bin/Debug folder and get the .dll files from there. You can add the .dll files you want in Blend by right clicking on the Reference folder in the project pane.This tutorial goes into more about how to add a .dll file in the project reference folder. http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/interactivity-without-code/ Thanks, Qixing

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2009
    the not playing part has something to do with scripting and browser discover on ie it works fine firefox is a no go :(

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2009
    Great tutorials. I watched all 4 and was able to quickly make a simple SketchFlow application at: http://openlightgroup.net/Blog/tabid/58/EntryId/16/SketchFlow-Rocks.aspx

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2009
    I've been through a number of SketchFlow tutorials including the sample chapter to the upcoming book on SketchFlow found here http://www.dynamic-prototyping.com/ The thing I'm trying to figure out how to do is add simple conditional logic to my SketchFlow prototype. Lets say that I want to create a prototype with a login and password field + a submit button. I want to make a prototype that checks if the login and password entered are correct when the user clicks submit. How would I construct something like that in SketchFlow? Would I use behaviors, triggers or actions? I'm hoping that I don't need to use XAML or VB script or something. Any ideas?

  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2009
    Very nice tutorials Thank You Anshulee

  • Anonymous
    September 03, 2009
    Hi all, This tutorial should be working in both IE and Firefox. Please let me know if you are still having problems. Thanks, Qixing