CHAPTER 1 ■ LEARNING THE CORE BLEND IDE
2
far as the other members of the Microsoft Expression family are concerned, we will not be
making use of them in this text. Nevertheless, you may want to explore them on your own, so
the following quick tour describes the high-level nature of each member of the Microsoft
Expression family.
The Role of Expression Web
Expression Web is a tool that allows you to visually create production-ready (and standards-
based) web sites. Even though this is a Microsoft web development tool, you are not limited to
the use of ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX (although support for the .NET platform within
Expression Web is excellent). If you wish, you can use the integrated page designers and source
code editors to construct web sites using PHP, HTML/XHTML, XML/XSLT, CSS, JavaScript, as
well as Adobe Flash and Windows Media components.
Expression Web also ships with a companion product named SuperPreview. This aspect of
Expression Web (greatly) simplifies the testing of your web site across several popular web
browsers (for both Windows and Mac). If you are a web-savvy developer, you know that
ensuring a web page renders and behaves properly across diverse environments is a constant
source of irritation. Using Expression Web and SuperPreview, you have a solid set of tools to
help with this endeavor.
The Role of Expression Encoder
Although we will not use Expression Encoder for this book, be aware that this tool provides a
platform to import, edit, and enhance video media, encoded in a wide variety of formats
including AVI, WMV, WMA, QuickTime MOV files (if installed), MPEG, VC-1, and H.264.
By way of an example, using Expression Encoder, you could create a professional training
video configured to stream within a Silverlight (or WPF) application. As well, Expression
Encoder can be used to create media that seamlessly integrates into a WPF/Silverlight
application via bookmarks and customizable skins.
The Role of Expression Design
Expression Design is a Microsoft tool that stands in direct competition with Adobe products
such as Illustrator and Photoshop (in fact, Expression Design, as well as Expression Blend, can
import file formats from each of these designer-centric applications). In a nutshell, Expression
Design is a tool that enables graphical artists to generate rich, vector-based graphics.
As you would expect, Expression Design allows a graphical designer to save their work in a
variety of standard image formats (PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, etc.). In addition, and for our
purposes more interestingly, Expression Design also allows you to save your graphical data in
WPF or Silverlight XAML.
As you may know, the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) is an XML-based
grammar used to describe the state of a .NET object (graphically based or otherwise). For example,
the following markup describes the look and feel for the vector image shown in Figure 1–1. Notice
that we are able to create a pleasing drop shadow effect and a complex radial gradient brush
used to fill the interior of the circle using just a few lines of XAML:
<Ellipse x:Name="shadowCircle" HorizontalAlignment="Left"
Height="117.5" Margin="99,58,0,0" Stroke="#FF0B17D6"
VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="117.5"
StrokeThickness="7">
<Ellipse.Effect>
<DropShadowEffect Color="#FFB7B8E0" BlurRadius="6"
HuFeiHu-Blog2015-04-16不错可以安装
shigang3912015-11-02非常不错，绝对值得一看
kobe_242013-03-08可以，试用一下！！
