Ryan Cromwell

One of the cool tools we had a chance to use while up at the WPF Bootcamp in Redmond was Expression Blend.  While there I became pretty engrossed in the ease with which you could create fairly cool animations without an intimate knowledge of Xaml.  This made it all that harder to leave seeing as we had the latest bits at the time (the Release Candidate is available as a 30 trial).  Fortunately, or gratefully?, Microsoft has decided to make it available on MSDN.  That means me!

I will say though, while reading Charles Petzold's book Application = Code + Markup which starts with Code and then moves to Xaml, I believe developers and designers alike will be fooled into trying to generate a number of more complex animations with paths, triggers/timelines, etc. rather than implement new animations via code.  Karsten Januszewski, who we were lucky enough to meet last week, pointed this exact scenario out while I was attempting to mimic the North Face kiosk carousel via a path.  He referenced a previous post of his which shows how to create a custom animation.  Until I grasp the animation framework in WPF, I'll not risk embarrassing myself by attempting to better explain what Karsten already does much better than I.