Product Description

This book is a very fast read. The author includes a LOT of pictures and shows you how to create some really great projects. The high point is where he walks you though creating a video player that uses "glassy orbs" for the main interface. His writing style is "look over my shoulder as I walk you through creating this example in real time". This makes it easy to follow and understand.

I have used earlier version of Expression Blend, but I never knew the "secrets" like how to make a ball appear as if a light is shining on it. I would not have been able to figure out things like that without the book. The book covers advanced subjects like MVVM but is definitely suitable for complete beginners.

The book also covers SketchFlow in a nice tight chapter that also shows you how to use the Visual State Manager (not an easy topic to cover but very important when using SketchFlow).

I would highly recommend this book to people out there that don't really have any prior knowlegde in WPF/SilverLight. I am a Web Designer with little to no knowledge of C# but this book gets you up and running fast. It gives you a good overview of Expression Blend 3 and how to use all the tools to start creating a RIA (Rich Internet Application). Victor Gaudioso does a great job of explaining what he is doing and why he is doing it. He has also gone above and beyond as a resource for not just the book but with any SilverLight questions I have had so far. I have emailed him numerous times with questions about the information in the book and with personal project questions. Each time he has responded immediately with great answers to my questions. He also maintains an ongoing blog with video tutorials based on questions he gets from his readers. Buy this book if you are looking to get into SilverLight so Victor Gaudioso can continuing to do this in the future.

So far the book is great at explaining the core features of Blend. It starts with a good overview of the layout controls which is crucial to Silverlight development.

I was kind of thrown back when I got to chapter 5 on Storyboards. I am a programmer/designer and I stick primarily with Visual Basic. I am also in the legal field, so the verbose and plain language syntax of Visual Basic suits me better than C#.

Anyhow, all of the code samples in the book are in C#. If you are a VB programmer, you will definitely need to consult other resources to get the code to work correctly. For instance, in order to wire-up effects via the Visual State Manager you will have to use delegates in Visual Basic. Most developers do not work with delegates on a daily basis, but it is crucial for Silverlight development. I'm not sure if C# uses delegates because it all looks like a bunch of gibberish to me. Not my cup of tea.

In conclusion, the author is great, but the book should have included VB samples. Contrary to popular belief, Visual Basic can do everything that C# can do. To make matters more complicated, both of these .net languages can do everything that XAML can do! Great stuff.

I have worked my way though most of this book and I have found it very helpful in getting started with Blend. In Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight, Victor Guidioso has assembled an excellent collection of examples that walk you through creating Silverlight applications from scratch using a combination of Blend and Visual Studio. This book is written in a style that emphasizes jumping right in and getting the job done. There are no gratuitous "video in a button" type examples here but examples based on the types of projects you are most likely to write. I found an error in the book which had a bad link for a source code download URL so I sent an email. To my surprise, not only did I get a reply email notifying me the link was fixed, Victor called me to let me know. You can't ask for anything better than that! Anyway, I found this book extremely helpful in getting started writing Silverlight applications with Blend and I think you will too!

I'm a professional software developer with some background in WPF. I purchased the book looking to increase my knowledge of Expression Blend and how one uses it with Silverlight. With this in mind, the book pretty much delivers the goods. Unfortunately though, the many mistakes/corrections needed get in the way of the knowledge transfer ...