WynApse

Hey Dave, it's Wednesday! -- Expression Follies

Guess it's late enough that I can't say it's Monday *somewhere*, huh? ... so 'Silverlight Monday' definitely took a hit this week

On the plus side, I now only have one University of Phoenix class going, and I got feedback out for both on time over the weekend, and grades out for the one finishing... overlapping by 2 weeks is 2 much!

My plan was to start in a multi-week project, and then maybe use that same project after MIX as a 2.0 experience. I have two in mind and after Pete Brown's article about drop-shadows last week, I decided I would go over to the dark side and try to build up some of this goodness in Expression *something* instead of hacking it in with my editor.

For the project I'm considering starting with, I need something that looks like a corkboard background, or at least that's what I want... want/need ... shrug. I could do that entire image pretty quickly in Paint Shop Pro (more below), but I wanted to be a good soldier and do it in one of the design tools. Since I want a frame and want the inside of it to appear to BE inside, I wanted to do the drop shadow a la Pete.

So I cranked up Expression Design, and was totally lost. I won't tell you how long it took me to get 3 layers up and running, but when I was done they looked pretty good... if you squinted your eyes anyway:

• Outer layer: chrome-look frame
• Middle layer: drop-shadow peeking out from under the frame to make the inner layer appear inset
• Inner layer: some fabric-sort of image

So I now had xaml of that (are you happy, Brad )

I pointed at that xaml with an html page setup with Silverlight 1.0, and yowzer ... that did NOT work. But of course I didn't expect it to work, it had lots of WPF-ey sorts of things in there. So I hacked/slashed my way through it until it ran, and not only was the drop shadow ugly, but the inner layer had one copy of the fabric dead-center, no tiling... ugh.

So last night, I cranked up Expression Blend (from December I think it is), and I *have* had some experience with that, but was trying to find all the goodness I was using the night before in Design and it wasn't there. I could NOT duplicate that image, and after fighting it for more than an hour in Blend, I fired up PSP.

I wrote down the time I started, and it took me 5 minutes to produce a png file suitable for the background in my project using PSP.  Now, I have something like 7 years experience in PSP, but still, the time difference is huge.

Agreeably, I have a static image, it's not vector, it's not all xaml-goodness ready, but sometimes you have to pick your battles, and I think I am going to stick with the familiar at least until such time that I start doing something in WPF (maybe SL 2.0??)

So, I may not have had a Silverlight Monday up, but I have had Silverlight Monday night and Silverlight Tuesday night of sorts trying to get something going for 'show and tell'.

Maybe tomorrow... it'll still be this week, does that count? ... maybe it's a Time Zone thing, living in Arizona, since we never change, I always get confused :)

posted @ Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:54 AM