How to add mockup controls to your Expression Blend library

In Expression Blend 4, one of the new samples we added is called MockupDemonstration. If you haven’t had a chance to use it yet, you can open MockupDemonstration from the Welcome screen, which is available when you first start Expression Blend or when you click Help and then click Welcome Screen. In the Welcome screen, click Samples, and then click MockupDemonstration:

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As you can tell quickly from exploring this sample, this sample contains a handful of controls designed to help you create prototypes easily. The catch is that these controls only exist within the confines of this particular sample. Since some of you have requested that it would be useful to have these controls available outside of the sample, this blog post will explain how to make these mockup controls available in other projects.

To enablemockup controls for any SketchFlow project, copy the mockup controls run-time and design-time assemblies from the MockupDemonstration sample to the pre-configured Libraries folder by following the steps below:

1. Copy both Microsoft.Expression.Prototyping.MockupsSL.dll and Design folder from:

Documents > Expression > Blend 4 > Samples > MockupDemonstration > MockupDemonstration > Libraries > Silverlight > Debug
 
(for WPF projects, follow this step but copy files from> Libraries > .NETFramework > Debug)

2. Add copied files to the following destination:

Computer > OS (C:) > Program Files(x86) > Microsoft Expression > Blend 4 > Libraries > Silverlight > 4.0 >
 
(for WPF paste the copied files from the NETFramework folder in the previous step to … > Libraries > .NETFramework > 4.0)

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3. Restart Blend. You can now start using mockup controls by clicking the Mockups category in the Assets panel (the appropriate assembly reference is automatically added to your project).

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post below or on our forums.

Thanks,

Dante, Rick, Billy