FAQ about expression Blend

From tech-ed last year to now, I have repeatedly talked about expression blend courses and published some related topics in my blog.Article. Recently, many of my friends asked questions about expression blend, picked out some of the most common ones, and shared some of my views with you.

 

Question 1: What is expression blend?

[Answer] Expression blend is a XAML-based application developed for Windows Phone 7, Windows 8, Silverlight, and WPF.ProgramDevelopment tools. As a development tool, the biggest difference between Visual Studio and Visual Studio is its powerful functions In UX design, such as editing UIS, animations, templates, etc. In actual development, expression blend and Visual Studio are used together to get twice the result with half the effort.

 

Question 2: Must expression blend be used to write Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 UIS?

[Answer] No. Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 (METRO) UIS are based on the XAML language, while the XAML language is essentially XML. Therefore, you can use Notepad and other tools to edit texts. Of course, expression blend provides quite complete and efficient functions for generating and editing the XAML language, so it has become the de facto preferred tool for XAML programming.

 

Question 3: Who can use expression blend?

[Answer] Expression blend is not only used to design static UIS, but also a tool for designing dynamic content and interactive functions. That's why we call it the UX design tool. Since it is a UX design tool, it is naturally used by UX designers.

What kind of talents are UX designers? Here is my personal opinion: UX is very different from traditional UI. The former focuses on user experience and interaction; while the latter focuses on ease of use, in fact, the work of uidesigners is often fixed on "getting a better look at the Interface. A qualified UX designer should first have certain UI skills and understand common design patterns (this design pattern is not another design pattern ), and have certain drawing capabilities (not to be a Photoshop expert, but at least to be able to use a mainstream drawing tool to express your ideas accurately and freely), as well as the basic knowledge about animation production. On the other hand, you should also understand certain programming knowledge, especially the processing logic related to human-computer interaction (such as data binding, dependency attributes, delegated events, custom control declaration and inheritance ), these are the prerequisites for giving full play to the powerful functions of the XAML language.

Of course, there are not many people with both design and development. A more feasible method is that programmers and designers work together to learn and master expression blend, use their skills to make up for each other and gradually deepen their understanding of UX design. In this way, two UX design experts will be gained.

 

Question 4: How should expression blend be learned?

[Answer] compared to the rich resources related to Visual Studio on the network, the expression blend-related tutorials are poor. The key to learning expression blend well is to be familiar with the various operations of this development tool. Therefore, I prefer to recommend some video resources, such:

Total training Microsoft Expression blend 4 essen( a famous Chinese donkey website has related resources)

The video tutorial described above describes the basic knowledge of expression blend very systematically and comprehensively.InspirationalLet's take a look at the development of the Microsoft platform program interface. In addition, we recommend two good places for frequent visits to get targeted and up-to-date content:

Http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

Http://expression.microsoft.com/

(It is clearly Microsoft's own website. Let's talk about it here)

 

Q 5: A lot of functions in expression blend are done by dragging and dropping. Does this mean that I don't have to writeCode?

[Answer] No. Expression blend provides a drag-and-drop design function to improve the efficiency of designers, rather than asking everyone to turn a blind eye to "write code. I suggest that you use expression blend to edit the interface while learning, analyze the generated XAML code, and gradually learn more about XAML programming, finally, you can easily write The XAML code manually. In actual projects, expression blend is strongly recommended. After all, it is much more efficient than manual code writing. Again, the premise of using expression blend is: You must be clear about what happened behind the drag and drop. After all, a tool is a tool that has limitations and occasionally has functions that cannot be completed. At this time, our skills in writing XAML code manually come in handy. In addition, the code automatically generated by tools is often redundant and needs to be removed and corrected manually to improve program execution efficiency and code conciseness.

 

OK. Here are some of my comments on the frequently asked questions about expression blend. I hope this will help you. You are welcome to discuss some questions about expression blend.