Silverlight. Day 2.

After the innitial trauma, I decided to read and check some tutorials to understand what is happening with Silverlight.

First of all. Why a new tool for GUI design instead of having it integrated to VS, as usual? Well, after watching the video tutorials related to Blend, its clear that VS UI editor is limited; we have use it just to size forms and put controls on them. But when the clients want some color, and shapes and gradients, etc, the effort to do this with the usual controls is too much.

One aproach is to develop or use a UI framework (thinking in reuse), with controls that have cappabilities to look better. However, the look and feel of these controls are not always the best.

This is where Blend fits OK. This Flashy editor lets you modify and edit almost any visual feature of the controols, and best of all, the specification is made in XML language, in this case XAML.

To have all these features in the standard IDE is too much and usability of VS could be affected. Nice thing is that the same files are used by VS and Blend, so no import utilities are needed.

Now I'm going to try the installation to get my hands dirty ;)