Book Image

Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook

By : Vibor Cipan (EUR)
Book Image

Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook

By: Vibor Cipan (EUR)

Overview of this book

Silverlight makes it much easier to build web applications with highly usable, interactive, and exciting user interfaces. However, with so many new options open to designers and developers, making the best use of the tools available is not always so easy. It's ease of use and rapid development process has left one area completely uncovered— how to design, build, and implement professional and usable interfaces, and create an enjoyable user experience and interaction. Written by a Microsoft MVP and Silverlight Prototyping Specialist, this book is the first and only book on developing Silverlight User Interfaces. Clear, step-by-step instructions show how to build all the user interface elements that users look forward to in a cutting edge app. This book offers essential recipes, with each recipe depicting the commonly used user interface patterns built with Silverlight, and in some cases, with WPF to showcase the possibilities. The author's experience in designing and developing user interfaces enables him to share insights on creating professional interfaces in a clear and friendly way. The book starts off with recipes dealing with fixed and fluid layouts, building custom command link controls, working with navigation, and collapsible panels, and then moves on to the more advanced topics such as calendars, alternating row colors, and task panes. The author covers a number of different UI patterns, controls, and approaches accompanied by XAML and C# code where needed (and explained), along with usage context and practical, proven, and professional techniques for specific controls and patterns. From maps to task panes, and web cam support to pixel shaders, this Cookbook provides you with a rich selection of Silverlight UI recipes. It covers all that you need to know in order to design and implement a user interface, together with professional user experience and interface guidelines to make your solutions and applications pleasurable for your users.The author has found himself in the role of both, a designer and a developer, at different points in his professional career, and his motive was to create a book that will serve as a useful resource for designers and developers trying to find their way with Silverlight and Expression Blend.By the end of the book, you will be able to create a rich, professional, and standards-compliant user interface.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Silverlight 4 User Interface Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface

Creating and using expanders and collapsible panels


When you are dealing with vast amounts of user interface elements, or data for that matter, you are generally interested in reducing the complexities and enabling your users to be able to use and find all options, but not at the cost of visual complexity and screen estate. In those situations, usage of collapsible panels and expanders can be a very good method for achieving your goals.

By organizing your tools, user interface controls, or some additional information into separate expander controls (more about later) or collapsible panels, you can ease the job for your users.

In fact, a number of today's mainstream applications are utilizing this specific UX pattern. One of the most prominent examples you'll see is the Expression Blend 3 user interface, especially the Properties pane with the number of different collapsible panels.

Getting ready

Start your Expression Blend 4 and then select New project... From the dialog that appears select...