Upcoming Expression Blend 2.5 Feature – Visual State Manager

As many of you may have heard, Bill Gates announced during his TechEd keynote today that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 will be released later this week. To coincide with Silverlight 2 Beta 2, we will be releasing updated versions of Expression Blend 2.5 and Deep Zoom Composer as well.

There are some nifty new tricks up Expression Blend 2.5’s sleeve for this release. One of them is known as the Visual State Manager, or VSM for short, which makes styling your controls easier. To learn more about this feature, visit Christian Schormann’s blog where he provides an overview of Creating Control Skins in the Visual State Manager.

Here is a snippet from Christian’s post on why this is an interesting feature:

Styling dynamic visuals, or “skinning”, is an important task for visual designers working on interactive applications for web and desktops. With Beta 2 of Silverlight, and the associated June preview of Expression Blend, we are making this work much easier and faster - and we are adding more creative options at the same time.

Very importantly, the model does not only work with controls explicitly written to support skinning via templates (such as the built-in and 3rd party controls) - designers can use the same model and tools to easily define dynamic visuals for UserControls they create.

Stay tuned for more updates later on this week when we provide more information on VSM, tutorial videos by Steve White, and an updated version of Blend 2.5 where you can try out the new VSM features for yourself.

Cheers!
Kirupa