Expression Blend

[Ronny]

I saw in wpf books that Expression Blend is recommended to develop wpf
application. In the Expression suit there are some other products.
My question- in order to develop desktop application is there any need to
the other products and in what way?
Is it a must?
Is there some article that covers that?

Regards

Ronny

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

I saw in wpf books that Expression Blend is recommended to develop wpf
application. In the Expression suit there are some other products.
My question- in order to develop desktop application is there any need to
the other products and in what way?
Is it a must?

It depends on what you want to achieve.

For simple WPF-based applications VS alone is sufficient, although the user
experience is not the best (designers are "limited"). Expression Blend
simplifies this process. It is intended for designers who design the user
interfaces, not directly developers. The other Expression programs may be
useful too for content creation, but as I said, it depends on what you want
to achieve.

 

[Ronny]

Thanks Mr. Wagner,
I actually want to create some GUI with menu,toolbar and buttons, without
any animation, but I'd like these controls to look professional and not
standard. Is there any article that explains the role of the Expression
products?

Thanks
Ronny

 

[Herfried K. Wagner [MVP]]

I actually want to create some GUI with menu,toolbar and buttons, without
any animation, but I'd like these controls to look professional and not
standard.

What do you mean by looking standard? At least for me the standard design
is the most professional one. For this job VS' designers are sufficient and
you do not need the Expression products at all. Expression blend is
intended to create animated, feature-rich, and custom user interfaces. Note
that you can apply themes to the standard controls too (take a look at the
style APIs in XAML/WPF).