Using Expression Blend 4 to build Windows Phone Apps: The beginnning
I have come up with some ideas on how to build Windows Phone Apps using Expression Blend, and only Expression Blend to build apps. Expression Blend 4 is provided with the Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone. If you want to build products using Visual Studio you may want to take a look at Kenny Spades latest blogs and keep on following him at: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/kennyspade/, and he is a good writer unlike me.
So why Expression Blend 4 and not Visual Studio, well there are a number of reasons, if you are a good programmer like Jerry Nixon, see his very well written blog at: https://blog.jerrynixon.com/ ,and I have no idea why I would reference someone so good. Doesn’t do me much good. But there you go.
Now both Kenny and Jerry are definitely code heads, they live and breath code, ask them a question about code and they don’t explain what to do, they write the code quickly and easily. But not everyone is like that, some people like to think of an idea and then use the tools to directly make things.
Visual Studio coding is like a great artist, a great artist will use a big tube of White, and smaller tubes of the primary colors, they don’t buy those big boxes of colors they mix the colors. Now other people just want to make something that works and move on, it is about expressing themselves.
So with Expression Blend, there are tools included in Expression that can help you quickly build working applications and I am going to be discussing how to use Expression Blend over the next few blogs, and I will stay focused on this.
The go do for this blog is this:
Install the Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone 7.1, if you already have done so, naturally don’t do it again.
Then Download and unzip the following:
View the videos, bear in mind that if you use Windows Media (the default on windows), you can view it in a faster mode about 1.4 speed and that helps with staying focused on the material. At the end of the video you will have a calculator that will run on the phone, have a better idea of how to organize controls as well as a little coding experience, but not much.
Ok, get to work.