Book Review – Pro Expression Blend 4 (Apress)

• Author: Andrew Troelsen
• Paperback:400 pages
• Publisher:Apress; 1 edition (March 4, 2011)
• Language:English
• ISBN-10:143023377X
• ISBN-13: 978-1430233770

I got my first exposure to Microsoft Expression Blend when I read Beginning
Silverlight 3 by Robert Lair. In the book I learned some basic animation and
how to make a Silverlight interface look better by using Expression Blend.

Fast forward to Pro Expression Blend 4 by Andrew Troelsen and my
Expression Blend skills were sent through the roof. This book is a great tool
for anyone wishing to ramp up their knowledge of Expression Blend – which is the
preferred user interface designer for both Silverlight and WPF projects. I also
found this book useful in designing apps for Windows Phone 7 which also uses
XAML-based code.

Perhaps this may be a good spot to say that Expression
Blend is part of Microsoft Expression Studio. This is not a free product and it
can be quite expensive to get all the tools you may need that are demonstrated
in this book. Although you can get 60-day trial versions of some aspects of the
studio, some things in this book may not be available to you unless you have
purchased this product.

The first section of the book takes you on a
detailed walkthrough of the IDE and helps you learn all the tools. This in-depth
session makes getting around the IDE easier which allows you to get onto the
more enjoyable task of developing.

The second section then leads you
through a series of demos where you can put your skills to the test and learn
all the intricacies of the IDE. The last chapter of this section gives you an
in-depth look at SketchFlow which was a product that I did not have a lot of
experience with beforehand but I gained some useful insight into how this could
be used in future projects.

There are labs and code examples using both
XAML and C# but this book is mostly based in theory so the code snippets do not
dominate the book. This book straddles the line between being accessible to both
developers and designers who want to use Expression Blend 4. It also ranges in
skill levels between novices and professionals. I think it does so successfully
that it can be used by anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the
tool.