Level: Introductory to Intermediate
Blend for Visual Studio 2013 brings a number of great new features for developers of Windows Store apps, as well as a few great enhancements for WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone app developers as well. There are some great new designer features for laying out and arranging your views, support for Windows 8.1 specific new controls and device capabilities, and some other assorted enhancements. Some of the big enhancements surround using behaviors, animations, and visual states in your XAML and HTML Windows Store applications to bring them up to par with what WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone apps have been able to do for a while. In this session you will get a good tour of all the new features, learn a bit about behaviors and why they are important, and learn how to leverage all the new capabilities that can accelerate not only your Windows Store app development, but make you a more productive WPF, Silverlight, or Windows Phone developer as well.
You will learn:
- How to use the new layout rulers, guides, and snapping of Blend to get more precise and nicely aligned layout of your controls in a view.
- About behaviors and how to use them in Windows Store apps as well as WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone and what the similarities and differences are
- How to leverage Windows 8.1 specific features directly from the Blend designer