To gain more experience with Blend I completed some tutorials on
Inspite of learning more about Blend it was interesting to see a full blown Silverlight app. It is very good looking but not being able to use the back button is kind of weird. My take on that is: For Webuser always provide a way to navigate back (I know windows user do not need it because they just use their undo button…)
But I really like how they guide you through the basics.
Also I was pleasantly surprised that the actual Xaml was not to much screwed up by Blend.
Of course there is always a but:
"But" I found on Bug with Blend in the 2.5 Preview version.
Coming from WPF and using Dynamic Resources you don’t spend too much attention of the sequence of elements in the Resource Dictionary.
But as you all know (I hate this expression – but I guess I have to use it at least once in my blog) Silverlight does only support StaticResources. Bummer.
This means when you add items to the ResourceDictonary - which itself use StaticResources - Blend gets confused. It compiles fine but you get a runtime error.
It is easy to fix – you just switch into Xaml mode and move the items to the correct position.
Note the CRL instantiated the items by sequence and if it does not find a StaticResource it throws an exception.
I have to admit somehow it was satisfying to see, that you still need Xaml knowledge and that all the effort to learn it was not a waste of time (or maybe it was just good for my ego to realize I am soooo smart that I can actually find a bug)
I wish all you Xaml people a good start into your Xaml week
Tom